THE EPIGRAM AND ITS GREATEST MASTER 7 



the object on which it appeared. A tomb might be inscribed with a 

 father's brief but bitter plaint that he had laid therein his darhng son, his 

 life's high hope. A pillar might be eloquent with words in which the 

 poet glorified the transcendent fidehty of those who died batthng for the 

 fatherland. " These men, having set a crown of imperishable glory upon 

 their own land, were folded in the dark cloud of death; yet being dead 

 they have not died, since from on high their excellence raises them glori- 

 ously out of the house of Hades."' On the base of a statue of Niobe by 

 Praxiteles an enthusiastic admirer might inscribe: ''From Hfe the gods 

 turned me into stone, and from stone Praxiteles wrought me back again 

 to life." On a rock beside a spring some tuneful wayfarer in dusty 

 Attica might cut this dainty invitation : 



Stranger, by this worn rock thy limbs repose; 

 Soft through the verdant leaves the light wind blows; 

 Here drink from the clear spring at noonday heat, 

 Such rest to way-worn travelers is sweet. 



But these examples have carried us to the point where the epigram is 

 no longer of necessity an inscription, but is still a poem that might have 

 been inscribed, and thenceforward we find the epigram treating any 

 theme that can be compassed in a few fines. Strato may hymn in unsur- 

 passed lyric verse the love that dies not and the beauty that age may alter 

 but cannot lessen: 



O how I loved when like the glorious sun 

 Firing the Orient with a blaze of light, 

 The beauty every lesser star outshone ! 



Now o'er that beauty steals the approach of night. 

 Yet, yet, I love ! Tho' in the western sea 

 Half sunk, the day star still is fair to me. 



Even greater than the beauty unquenched by age is the beauty that 

 is undimmed by death: 



Thou wert the morning star among the living, 



Ere thy fair light had fled. 

 Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving 

 New splendor to the dead.^ 



' The rendering is by Mackail, one of oiu: best translators; but it fails to convey the effective beauty 

 of the original. 



' Despite my unbounded love for Shelley, I can but feel that this rendering by him falls short of the 

 Greek. Merivale has been more successful, but with the easier preceding epigram. 



