OF THE PASSIONS. 



455 



I lifted his helmet : I saw his locks 

 Disordered, uneven, in sweat. 

 My cry arose — 



And he raised with difficulty his eye. 

 Death came, like a cloud on the sun : — 



No more shall thou see thy Oscar. 



The heauty of Evirchoma is darkened. 



Her son, unconscious, holds the end of a spear: 



Feeble was her voice, and few her words. 



I raised her up with my hand, 



But she laid my palm on the head of her s(m, 



While her sigh rose frequent. 



Dear child ! vain is thy fondling ; 

 Thy mother no more shall arise. 



1 will, myself, be a father to thee • 



But Evirallin is no more. 



Yet the poem must not be closed without giving you its conclusion ; its 

 exquisite moral, and its sublime epitaph. 



What is the strength of the warrior, 

 Though he scatter the battle as withered leaves? 

 To-day though he may be valiant in the field. 

 To-morrow the beetle will triumph over him. 



Prepare, ye children of musical strings. 

 The bed of Gaul and his sunbeam [standard] by him : 

 Let his resting-place be seen from afar, 

 By high branches overshadowed ; 

 Under the wing of the oak of greenest foliage, 

 Of quickest growth, and most durable form. 

 Shooting forth its leaves to the breeze of the shower, 

 When the heath around is still withered. 



Its leaves, from the extremity of the land, 

 Shall be seen by the birds of the summer; 

 And each bird shall perch, as it arrives, 

 On a sprig of its verdant branches. 

 Gaul, in his mist, shall hear their cheerful note, 

 While the virgins are singing of Evirchoma. 



Until all of these shall perish. 

 Never shall your memory be disunited. 

 Until the stone shall crumble into dust, 

 And the oak-tree decay with age; 

 Until streams shall cease to flow. 

 And the mountain-waters be dried up at their source ; 

 Until there be lost, in the flood of age. 

 Each bard, and song, and subject of story, 

 The stranger shall not ask, " Who was Morni's son?" 

 Or, " Where was the dwelling of the king of Strumon V 



The voice of the passions, then, vi^hether of joy or sorrow, of rage or ten- 

 derness, is the voice of poetry ; and the voice of poetry is, in consequence, 

 the voice of the passions. It is hence the earliest language of every nation; 

 and it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that it should have been employed 

 from a very remote period as the medium of national history, national my- 

 thology, and moral precepts ; its glowing and animated style being peculiarly 

 calculated to captivate the attention, and the recurrent measure or versifica- 

 tion which, under some shape or other, it has assumed, and could not fail to 

 assume, in every part of the world, being admirably adapted to assist the 

 memory. 



Hence, in the first ages of Greece, as well as of every other nation, priests, 

 philosophers, and statesmen, all delivered their instructions in poetry. 

 Apollo, Orpheus, and Amphion, the earliest bards of the Grecian states, are 

 represented as the first tamers of mankind, the first founders of order and 

 civilization. Minos and Thales sung to the lyre the laws which they com- 

 posed; and till the age immediately preceding that of Herodotus, history ap- 

 peared in no other form than that of poetical tales. At this time, however, 

 science began to rear her head through the regions of Arcadia ; the judgment 

 acquired daily strength ; and, while a soberer style was found to be befitting 

 the severer studies, and the simple narrative of national or biographical 

 events, the dialect of the passions was limited to those branches of speech or 

 writing which require ornament, attraction, or an excitement of the passions 

 themselves : and by such a change verbal composition soon rose to the rank 

 of a very extensive and complicated science ; the value of every word became 



