The Classics

Fain to know golden things, fain to grow wise,Fain to achieve the secret of fair souls:His thought, scarce other lore need solemnize,Whom Virgil calms, whom Sophocles controls:

Whose conscience Æschylus, a warrior voice,Enchaunted hath with majesties of doom:Whose melancholy mood can best rejoice,When Horace sings, and roses bower the tomb:

Who, following Caesar unto death, discernsWhat bitter cause was Rome's, to mourn that day:With austere Tacitus for master, learnsThe look of empire in its proud decay:

Whom dread Lucretius of the mighty lineHath awed, but not borne down: who loves the flame,That leaped within Catullus the divine,His glory, and his beauty, and his shame:

Who dreams with Plato and, transcending dreams,Mounts to the perfect City of true God:Who hails its marvellous and haunting gleams,Treading the steady air, as Plato trod:

Who with Thucydides pursues the way,Feeling the heart-beats of the ages gone:Till fall the clouds upon the Attic day,And Syracuse draw tears for Marathon:

To whom these golden things best give delight:The music of most sad Simonides;Propertius' ardent graces; and the mightOf Pindar chaunting by the olive trees:

Livy, and Roman consuls purple swathed:Plutarch, and heroes of the ancient earth:And Aristophanes, whose laughter scathedThe souls of fools, and pealed in lyric mirth:

Æolian rose-leaves blown from Sappho's isle;Secular glories of Lycean thought:Sallies of Lucian, bidding wisdom smile;Angers of Juvenal, divinely wrought:

Pleasant, and elegant, and garrulous,Pliny: crowned Marcus, wistful and still strong:Sicilian seas and their Theocritus,Pastoral singer of the last Greek song:

Herodotus, all simple and all wise:Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn:The surge of Cicero, that never dies:And Homer, grand against the ancient morn.