The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a
wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan op-
timism which finds no fault with human existence
save that it is so brief. It gains various expres-
sion in words that seem hot on a young man's lips,
and warm on the same lips even when no longer
young :

Til borrow life, and ?iot grow old ;

And nightingales and trees
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold,

tds young as Sophocles.
And again, in poignant notes :

You promise heavens free from strife,
Ture truth, and perfect change of will ;

'But sweet, sweet is this human life,

So sweet, I fain would breathe it still ;

Tour chilly stars I can forego,

This warm, kind world is all I know.
This last quotation is from the poem called
Mimnermus in Church. In this odd title he
seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet,



Ionica 3 1 5

who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive
stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting
from life all it had to offer, since there was
nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life
of life. The author of Ionica seems to bring the
old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to
conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning.
But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that
the preacher is right when he says that all earthly
pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed
as much at home under the olive tree ; it was be-
cause they were fugitive that he clung to them :

till beauteous things by which we live

'By laws of time and space decay.
'But oh I the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
