GIFT OF 
 
THE LAST PAGAN 
 
THE LAST PAGAN 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES WESTFALL THOMPSON 
 
 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS BEFORE 
 
 THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
 
 FORTY-THIRD YEAR 
 
 OCTOBER 9ra, 1916 
 
 But slow that tide of common thought 
 
 Which bathed our life retired ; 
 Slow, slow the old world wore to naught, 
 
 And pulse by pulse expired. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, Obermann Once More. 
 
 CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
 
 1917 
 
Copyright, 1917, by JAMES WESTFALL THOMPSON 
 
TO 
 W. H. P. 
 
 860775 
 
THE LAST PAGAN 
 
 VERY thoughtful man, when 
 he has reached the "forties" 
 of life, must have developed 
 some interest in philosophic 
 thought and have formed 
 some sort of philosophy of 
 his own, perhaps intangible 
 and incommunicable to others, 
 yet sufficient unto himself. Such men have 
 lived in every age, and will continue to be 
 unless the race is to perish of moral inanition. 
 The history of one such clear and brave 
 thinker of the Middle Ages, hitherto not mere 
 ly forgotten but utterly unknown, is embraced 
 between the covers of this little book. It is 
 that of a young mediaeval student, nurtured in 
 the academic skepticism prevailing at the Uni 
 versity of Paris in the thirteenth century, who 
 became fascinated with the study of ancient 
 philosophy, especially Neo-Platonism and 
 
Aristotelianism, knowledge of which the 
 Middle Ages acquired through the medium of 
 Arabic and Jewish thought. Finally, capti 
 vated by the glamour of the religion of Julian 
 and the dead gods, he secretly became a pagan 
 in thought and feeling. 
 
 ; ;"The ghosts of words and dusty dreams, 
 Old memories, faiths infirm and dead," 
 
 tc him became " the heritage of splendid, 
 moving things." 
 
 How came this forgotten paladin of pagan 
 ism to be discovered? From my boyhood the 
 imagery and vision of the famous hymn "Jeru 
 salem the Golden " * has had a charm for me, 
 though I am far from accepting its theology. 
 The authorship of this mediaeval Latin poem, 
 in the original entitled De contemptu mundi, 
 is ascribed to one Bernard of Cluny, of the 
 twelfth century. But who was Bernard of 
 Cluny? Tradition says that he was a Breton. 
 In the summer of 1906 I attacked the problem 
 of the authorship of this poem, and, as the 
 result of researches which need not be entered 
 into here, came to the conclusion that Bernard, 
 instead of having been a Breton, was a Pro- 
 vengal, a son of William V., seigneur of Mont- 
 
 1 For every thing pertaining to the authorship and 
 history of this famous hymn of the church see the 
 late Samuel Macauley Jackson s The source of "Jeru 
 salem the Golden," together with a prose translation 
 by Mr. Henry Preble, published by the University of 
 Chicago Press, 1910. 
 
pellier in southern France. This "footnote to 
 history" saw the light in the Cambridge 
 Journal of Theological Studies in April, 1907. 
 I never thought of reverting to the subject 
 again. 
 
 In the spring of that same year I went to 
 France for study, and there was forwarded to 
 me across the Atlantic once more a letter 
 which was to prove to be the open door to one 
 of the most interesting experiences which has 
 ever befallen me. It was a letter from His 
 Grace, Francois M. A. de Cabrieres, the bishop 
 of Montpellier, written in ecclesiastical Latin, 
 of which this is the translation : 
 
 BISHOPRIC OF MONTPELLIER 
 
 MONTPELLIER, HERAULT, 1907, 20 mai. 
 Optime Domine: 
 
 It was with great astonishment and pleasure that 
 I saw your article recently published in the last num 
 ber of the Journal of Theological Studies. 
 
 The town, popularly called Murles, is situated in 
 my diocese; but I had never heard that the pious 
 author of the poem concerning celestial glory was 
 born in it, and Neale himself locates the natal place 
 of our said monk in the town of Morlaix in Brittany, 
 and asserts that he was born of an English family. 
 
 But your opinion is very pleasing to me, and I would 
 like to know what has been published about the life, 
 the writings and the poem itself of Bernard, whether 
 in England, or in Germany, or among us. 
 
 I presume this much upon your kindness, and ask 
 that you will do me the favor to write a brief sum 
 mary, in which I may learn to what sources I should 
 go, what books also to read, in order that I may ac 
 quire knowledge readily in regard to this matter per- 
 
taining to my diocese, so distinguished by his birth 
 and virtues. 
 
 If ever, on any day, in travelling through France, 
 you wish to visit Montpellier, and God be willing to 
 lengthen my days till that time, it will be an honor 
 and a pleasure to me to be your guide to the ancient 
 town of Murles, and we will say our prayers together 
 not far from the ruins of that old castle where, per 
 haps, Bernard was born. 
 
 Believe me, Domine Optime, your humble and de 
 voted servant in Christ, 
 
 FR. M. A. DE CABRIERES, 
 Bishop of Montpellier. 1 
 
 1 Optime domine : 
 
 Maxima admiratione et satisfactione mihi fuit 
 quod, in ultimo fascicule Diarii de Theologicis Studiis, 
 nuperrime edito, tuam viderim notam super identi- 
 tate Bernardi Cluniacensis. Oppidum, vulgo Murles 
 appellatur, in mea diocesi situm est; sed numquam 
 audieram in eo natum fuisse pium auctorem Rhymthi 
 de gloria celesti: et ipse Neale natalem locum dicti 
 monachi nostri in urbe Britanniae minoris Morlaix 
 reponit, eumque e familia anglica ortum affirmat. Tua 
 vero sententia maxima mihi arridet, vellemque cog- 
 noscere quidquid de vita, scriptis et ipso rhymtho 
 Bernardi publicatum fuit sic, sive in Anglia, sive in 
 Germania, et etiam apud nos. Illud de benevolentia 
 prasumo quod mihi digneris scribere summam bre- 
 vem, in qua possim videre quasnam debeam fontes 
 adire, quos etiam libros percurrere ut convenienter 
 de tali diocesano meo, et natalibus et virtutibus prae- 
 claro notitiam acquirere possim. 
 
 Si quadam die, Galliam percurrendo, Montempes- 
 sulanum visitare desideras, et Deus dies meos ad hoc 
 usque tempus servare voluerit, ad antiquum pagum 
 Murles te ducere mihi honor erit et gaudium, am- 
 boque presec nostras effundemus non longe a ruderi- 
 bus veteris castelli ubi forsan Bernardus natus est. 
 
 Me, Domine Optime, tuus obsequiosus et devotus 
 servus in Christo, crede, 
 
 FR. M. A. DE CABRIERES, 
 episcopus Montempessulanensis. 
 
I lost no time in accepting this interesting 
 invitation. The bishop was a perfect type of 
 that charming kind of ecclesiastic of which 
 the French clergy, in particular, are examples. 
 He was tall and spare of figure, with an ascetic 
 beauty of countenance which made his face a 
 benediction; his manners were those of the 
 gentlest and most refined of grand seigneurs 
 of the ancien regime. I was glad when Pius X. 
 elevated him to the cardinalate, in which ex 
 alted office, alas, he lived too short a time. 
 
 The good bishop read English better than 
 he spoke it, and my French was no better, I 
 fear. But we managed to get along well. His 
 library was a place of joy a great room 
 lighted by diamond-paned windows, with the 
 atmosphere of a monastic scriptorium hover 
 ing over it. The visible books were few, save 
 for those upon his table. There were no book 
 cases. The books were all kept in presses 
 after the manner of the Middle Ages, as they 
 still are in the Vatican Library. 
 
 But we did not see Bernard s birthplace to 
 gether. The bishop s library had more attrac 
 tions for me than the obscure hamlet in the 
 country near by. Some of his books I already 
 knew, more of them I had read of but not 
 read. But books, except incunabula and those 
 rarissimmi libri which collectors prize, exist 
 in numbers great or less; examples even of 
 the rarest books may be found in the British 
 Museum or Harvard University Library. 
 
Manuscripts, however, are birds of another 
 feather. There may be, of course, several 
 copies of a manuscript. 1 But many are unique. 
 In the small collection of manuscripts which 
 the bishop possessed was one which soon fixed 
 my attention. 
 
 Every one knows the story of Browning s 
 "Old Yellow Book," that crumpled mass of 
 parchment in which he discovered the plot of 
 The Ring and the Book, a manuscript now 
 among the cherished treasures of a great li 
 brary. In a smaller degree such a discovery 
 was then mine. With pride, yet with a certain 
 measure of hesitation, the bishop laid before 
 me a few leaves of parchment for the posses 
 sion of which he whimsically apologized. It 
 was a medieval Latin poem composed of two 
 hundred and forty hexameter lines, covering 
 eight pages. The parchment leaves measured 
 six and three-quarters inches in length by 
 
 1 Some ancient authors have descended to modern 
 times in one MS. only, or in a few MSS. derived im 
 mediately or with little interval from one. Such are 
 Lucretius, Catullus, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius in 
 his "Silvse." Others there are whose text, though in 
 the main reposing on a single copy, can be corrected 
 here and there from others, inferior indeed, but still 
 independent and indispensable. Such are Juvenal, 
 Ovid in his "Heroides," Seneca in his "Tragedies," 
 and Statius in his "Thebais" and "Achilleis." There 
 is a third class whose text comes down from a remote 
 original through separate channels, and is preserved 
 by MSS. of unlike character but like fidelity, each 
 serving in its turn to correct the faults of others. 
 
 A. E. Housman, Manilius, Astronomicon, bk. I, 
 introd. xxx-xxxi. 
 
four inches in breadth. The text itself meas 
 ured five and three-quarters inches in length 
 by two and three-quarters inches in width. 
 There were thirty lines to a page. As a rule 
 the letters of the manuscript were excellently 
 formed, but small. The first letters of each 
 line were separated from the others, so as to 
 appear like a column of figures. The manu 
 script was probably of the late thirteenth 
 century. Whether it was the original or a 
 copy of the original I am unable to say. It 
 is certainly the only known example in exist 
 ence, and I am inclined to believe that it was 
 the original handwriting of the author. See 
 ing my intense interest in the poem, the good 
 bishop permitted me to make a transcript 
 of it, and I spent two arduous but delightful 
 days in so doing. That is why I never got 
 to Murles with the bishop. At the end of 
 this term I had already imposed too much 
 upon his time. Dear old saintly man, I cher 
 ish the memory of him! 
 
 The poem is the most startlingly pagan ut 
 terance which I know of in the whole field of 
 mediaeval literature. It was without formal 
 title, the only indication of such being merely 
 the capital letters D. V. R. at the head of the 
 first page. For a time they had for me the 
 cabalistic mystery of the famous DXV of 
 Dante in Purgatorio, canto xxxiii. After some 
 study of the manuscript I came to the conclu 
 sion that the mysterious letters stood for De 
 
vera religione -"Concerning true religion." 
 This title, I believe, was directly borrowed by 
 the unknown writer from a treatise of St. 
 Augustine with the same title, and was delib 
 erately so chosen. For the whole purpose of 
 Augustine s tract is to prove that there was no 
 religion worthy of the name in the ancient 
 pagan cults; while the whole tenor of this 
 poem is to show that "forgotten things," as 
 Sir Gilbert Murray has reminded us, " if there 
 be real life in them, will sometimes return out 
 of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward 
 groping of humanity." x 
 
 In the history of thought there are cycles, 
 each characterized by a dominant form of 
 thinking and a peculiar quality of the imag 
 ination. The lines of partition are not always 
 distinct between these periods, of course, and 
 the edge of one epoch blurs into that of the 
 next. But nevertheless the differentiation is 
 manifest. The Renaissance merged into the 
 Reformation, though the exact point of trans 
 formation is undiscernible. The dividing line 
 is really not a point or a mark, but a 
 penumbra. 
 
 But great thoughts, and especially great 
 systems of thought or philosophy, rarely 
 wholly die. The Greek and Latin classics 
 still live, and nearly every high philosophy 
 yet has some votaries. Names may be 
 changed, but the teaching remains imperish- 
 
 1 Four stages of Greek religion, p. 184. 
 8 
 
able. Every philosophic system may be con 
 sidered both from the point of view of its own 
 time and of all time from the latter because 
 it presents some solution to the problems 
 which the universe raises that an intelligent 
 mind may adopt. 1 
 
 Thus it happens that in every age there have 
 
 ^s Sir Leslie Stephen quite just when he writes: 
 "The briefest possible glance at the old systems of 
 philosophy shows us ... nothing but imperishable 
 ruins imperishable aesthetically, but logically mere 
 crumbling fragments. We can still read Plato with 
 delight; but the delight is due to the beauty of style 
 and exposition, not certainly to the conviction im 
 posed by his reasoning. Aristotle s philosophy is a 
 marvel for his time; but his theory of the universe is 
 no more tenable than his natural science. . . . The 
 vast development of scholastic philosophy in the 
 Middle Ages showed only how far unlimited ingenuity 
 and subtlety may lead in the wrong direction, if it 
 starts with mistaken principles. It ended by upset 
 ting the doctrines which it attempted to prove, and 
 had finally to commit suicide or fall before the in 
 surrection of living thought. The great who revolted 
 against its tyranny in its later stages constructed new 
 systems which, to them, seemed demonstrable, but 
 which to us are already untenable. We cannot 
 accept Descartes or Spinoza or Leibnitz or Bacon or 
 Hobbes or Locke as giving satisfactory or even 
 coherent systems. . . . Philosophies of every differ 
 ent variety have been not merely accepted by those 
 who first devised them, but have been taken up in 
 good faith by whole schools of disciples; they have 
 been tested, on a large scale, by systematic applica 
 tion to all relevant questions, and one after another 
 has become bankrupt, has lost its hold on the world, 
 and confessed that it leaves the riddle as dark as it 
 was before." Leslie Stephen, "The vanity of phil 
 osophizing," in Social Rights and Duties, vol. 2, pp. 
 187-89. 
 
been souls out of tune with the prevailing note 
 of their time, whose spiritual affiliation is with 
 a remoter, earlier epoch. The older the race 
 grows, and the greater the variety and accre 
 tion of its history, the more numerous do these 
 phenomena surviving from a former period 
 become in our modern life. Whistler was a 
 child of the Renaissance, Newman of the 
 twelfth century. 
 
 Such an one is, we say, "misunderstood," 
 when we should say that he is "ununder- 
 stood." It is of the nature of man to look 
 askance at the votaries of unconventional 
 things, whether of art or literature, of phil 
 osophy or religion. Convention owes much 
 of its force to mass weight, tradition, the in 
 ertia of conservatism. It is, therefore, in that 
 degree, a denial in terms of imagination in 
 life. When convention is backed by the au 
 thority of state or church to enforce conform 
 ity in the form of sumptuary laws governing 
 clothes and attire, or in the form of dogmas 
 prescribing what shall be believed and pro 
 hibiting what shall not be believed, then it be 
 comes a tyranny, and the man who manifests 
 unconventional ideas which are not according 
 to the standards imposed is regarded as a 
 rebel or a heretic. 
 
 For many years it was the prevailing belief 
 that the Middle Ages were characterized by 
 an absolute ignorance of and hostility to anti 
 quity until the Italian Renaissance; that me- 
 
 10 
 
diaeval literature and mediaeval art were spon 
 taneously developed, in full originality, with 
 out the aid of ancient thought and ancient art. 
 Only of late has this erroneous idea been 
 overthrown, or at least radically modified. 
 Modern research into the history of mediaeval 
 culture has conclusively shown that mediaeval 
 literature and the fine arts owed much both of 
 their inspiration and their form to the persist 
 ence of antiquity. 1 
 
 The charm of antiquity exerted its spell 
 over mediaeval minds more than we think, in 
 spite of the antagonism between mediaeval and 
 ancient ideals. The opposition between the 
 two ideals began to be apparent in the third 
 century. The ancient world saw its genius 
 expiring in the time of the Antonines. After 
 
 1 Anton Springer, Das Nachleben der Antike im 
 Mittelalter, 2 vols., Bonn, 1886, and a review of this 
 work by Eugene Muntz in Journal des Savants, 1887. 
 
 Rahn, Das Erbe der Antike, Basel, 1872. 
 
 Bartoli, / Precursori del Rinascimento, 1876; 
 
 Comparetti, Virgilio net media evo. 
 
 Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle immagiozioni 
 del media evo. 
 
 Gaston Paris, La legende de Trajan. 
 
 Gidel, La legende d Aristote. 
 
 Sathas, Roman d Achille. 
 
 Paul Meyer, La legende d Alexandre. 
 
 Dunger, Die Sage vom trojanischen Kriege in den 
 Bearbeitungen des Mittelalters und ihre antiken 
 Quellen, Leipzig, 1839. 
 
 Boutaric, La connaissance de I antiquite chez 
 Vincent de Beauvais. 
 
 Julien, "Alexandre pendant le Moyen-Age," in 
 Annales archeologiques, 1847. 
 
 11 
 
them the originality of the mind of the ancient 
 world utterly disappeared; the taste became 
 banal; thought stagnant. Christianity, al 
 though in part suffering from the universal 
 decadence, showed a greater intellectual and 
 moral force than the secular world, and began 
 to form its own canons of literature and art. 
 Yet for a long time Christianity was content 
 to borrow from paganism the established for 
 mulae, giving them, however, a new applica 
 tion and a new interpretation. But little by 
 little truly Christian themes developed. Begun 
 during the period of the persecutions, the 
 transformation was completed by the early 
 fifth century. By that time Christian thought 
 and Christian art, even though retaining a 
 great number and variety of motifs which 
 were of pagan origin, nevertheless not only 
 had developed its own types, but had crystal 
 lized them. A new world of art and of the 
 spirit had come into being. 
 
 During the first period belief in the superi 
 ority of Graeco-Roman literature and art, at 
 least from the point of view of form, was un 
 challenged, except among the zealots of the 
 faith. What was denied and opposed was the 
 immorality of the ideas, the license of the por 
 trayal. But the victory of the church in the 
 fourth century altered the relation of things. 
 The persecuted church became the triumphant 
 church. It was for its former adversaries 
 henceforward to plead for clemency. 
 
 12 
 
What attitude did the church adopt towards 
 the literature, the art, the philosophy of anti 
 quity? It was one chiefly of hostility and 
 icorioclasm. "Let us shun the lying fables of 
 the poets and forego the wisdom of the sages 
 of antiquity," exclaims Gregory of Tours in 
 600 A.D. Yet centuries of spoliation and 
 neglect were required to waste the inestimable 
 heritage derived from the past. Perhaps we 
 may regard the eleventh century as the epoch 
 when the reminiscence of antiquity ceased to 
 be a living force and passed into the domain 
 of history and erudition. By that time only 
 a few strong spirits still cherished in their 
 secret hearts ideals out of a glorious past, and 
 strove to breast the current of prejudice and 
 indifference. 
 
 The hostility of both the mediaeval church 
 and the mediaeval princes to antiquity was 
 partly a matter of principle, partly instinctive. 
 The church and the secular powers were 
 banded together to sustain the Christian re 
 ligion, the authority of the church, and the 
 polity of a feudal Europe against innovation 
 and change. The memory of ancient Roman 
 republicanism was a prolific inspiration to 
 revolution in certain parts of mediaeval Eu 
 rope and most of all in Rome. In 998 Nicho 
 las Crescentius, the son of a tribune of Rome, 
 attempted to overthrow the papal domination 
 by an impassioned appeal to the glories of 
 pagan and republican Rome. Out of frag- 
 
 13 
 
ments of ancient ruins he built that pictur 
 esque little house which still stands facing the 
 Ponto Rotto. In the twelfth century Arnold of 
 Brescia proclaimed the necessity of destroying 
 the temporal power of the popes and the re 
 building of the Capitol. The same enthusiasm 
 for antiquity fired Cola di Rienzi. Yet even 
 in the Kulturdammerung of the eleventh cen 
 tury there are gleams of the old light. Andre 
 of Fleury [died circa 1056], describing the 
 architectural changes which his superior, the 
 abbot Gosselin, made in that monastery, uses 
 the famous phrase attributed to Augustus: 
 urbem laterciam repperi, relinquam mar- 
 moream. 
 
 In the twelfth century a new spirit, or rather 
 the old spirit become new, began to blow 
 across Europe, which drew its inspiration 
 from the pagan world. Ancient culture began 
 slowly to come into its own once more. Arch 
 bishop Heraclius of Lyons [died 1163] wrote 
 a treatise entitled: De coloribus et artibus 
 Romanorum, in which he deplored the de 
 struction of the monuments of antiquity. Pil 
 grimages to Rome stimulated interest in the 
 remote past. 
 
 Bishop Henry of Winchester [1129-71] re 
 turned from a visit to the Eternal City with a 
 great collection of ancient marbles, to the 
 astonishment of his people. In Germany 
 Hildesheim early became the seat of a fascin 
 ating artistic renaissance. Bishop Bernward 
 
 14 
 
[993-1022], inspired by a visit to Italy, the 
 country most redolent of antiquity and pagan 
 tradition, with the aid of imported Italian 
 craftsmen, created those exquisite bronze 
 doors which separate the west vestibule from 
 the nave in Hildesheim cathedral. Italy itself 
 had nothing approaching them until Ghiberti 
 created those world famous bronze doors of 
 the Battistero in Florence. In twelfth cen 
 tury France "Hildebert of Le Mans was a 
 classical scholar, and in his time unmatched 
 as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of 
 his elegiac poems survive, some of them," says 
 Taylor, "so antique in sentiment and so cor 
 rect in metre as to have been taken for pro 
 ducts of the pagan period. One of the best is 
 an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his 
 visit to that city of ruins." * 
 
 This reviving interest in antiquity did not 
 pass unchallenged. The church was not un 
 willing to have scholars like John of Salisbury 
 toy with classical literature as an intellectual 
 diversion. But it was quite another thing in 
 the church s eye to have men derive a spiritual 
 inspiration from the founts of paganism. The 
 "pious" and the self-righteous bitterly in 
 veighed against the lovers of ancient culture. 
 "Who now toils to learn the divine writings 
 so much as those that are pagan?" Bernard of 
 
 "On Hildebert of Le Mans see Taylor, The Me 
 diaeval Mind, vol. II, pp. 137-47. His elegy on the 
 ruins of Rome is given in vol. II, pp. 191-92. 
 
 15 
 
Cluny scornfully exclaims. "He that babbles 
 Socrates and has the sinuous utterances of the 
 sophists at his fingers ends he is made an 
 abbot. ... A great man is he who knows 
 Agenor and Melibceus and Sapphic verse. 
 The letters of old, the muse of old, are now 
 highly prized and thought the cream of 
 wisdom." 
 
 The leaven of antiquity worked a spirit of 
 intellectual revolt in Italy as early as the 
 eleventh century. Vilgard, master of the 
 school at Ravenna, declared that what the 
 ancient poets had said was true, and that they 
 were worthier of belief than the Christian 
 mysteries. 1 
 
 In the reign of Robert the Pious of France 
 a considerable sect of heretics developed in 
 the vicinity of Orleans, who declared that 
 miracles were fables and repudiated almost 
 the whole body of Christian mysteries. Many 
 of them were burned at the stake the earliest 
 example of what became a common practice 
 of the Inquisition in the thirteenth century. 2 
 The first conspicuous victim of the church who 
 was condemned because he followed the lure 
 of ancient thought too far was Amaury of 
 Chartres, who was professor of logic and exe 
 gesis in the University of Paris, and who fell 
 under the spell of Plotinus and became a Neo- 
 
 1 Rodolf Glaber, Historiarum, Bk. II, ch. 12. 
 2 Rodolf Glaber, Bk. Ill, ch. 8; Renan, Aver roes et 
 averroisme, p. 282. 
 
 16 
 
Platonist, though he borrowed much also 
 from the Stoics and Aristotle. Condemned as 
 a pantheist he was burned with ten of his fol 
 lowers in the first decade of the thirteenth 
 century. 1 Roger Bacon was profoundly im 
 bued with paganism, declaring that "we should 
 seek in the books of the ancient philosophers 
 the soul of truth which revelation placed 
 there; that we should follow up the traces of 
 Christian dogma in paganism [a most pene 
 trating utterance] and thus add all we can to 
 our inherited treasure usque ad finem mundi, 
 quia nihil perfectum in humanis adinvention- 
 ibus." He had the courage to say that "con 
 temporary Christians were inferior morally to 
 the pagan philosophers, from whose books 
 they might well take a leaf." 3 
 
 While it is true, as Coulton has observed, 
 that "the more abstract dogmas inherited from 
 the early ages of Greek discussion the Greek 
 ages, tinged with Greek philosophy never 
 seem to have influenced the popular mind 
 very much," 4 nevertheless, especially in the 
 thirteenth century, there were many classes 
 of society deeply penetrated by the pagan 
 
 *For literature on Amaury of Chartres see Cheva 
 lier, Bio-biblio graphic, p. 95. 
 
 2 See quotation in De Wulf, History of Mediaeval 
 Philosophy, p. 393. 
 
 3 Thorndike, "Roger Bacon," in American Histor 
 ical Revieiv, Jan., 1916, p. 247. 
 
 4 Coulton, "The Plain Man s Religion in the Middle 
 Ages." Hibbert Journal, April, 1916, p. 596. 
 
 17 
 
philosophic thought of antiquity. Plato, Aris 
 totle, and Lucretius were the greatest of these 
 influences. That of the first tended towards 
 pantheism and was far less destructive of 
 established authority than the two others. 
 Enormous and revolutionary as the influence 
 of Aristotle was upon mediaeval thought, its 
 effect was wholly among the highest intel 
 lectual circles, chiefly at Paris, where the 
 university was deeply imbued with academic 
 skepticism. 
 
 The philosophy of Lucretius, on the other 
 hand, pervaded various strata of middle class 
 society and was disquieting and destructive of 
 prevailing authority in both church and state, 
 in especial in the case of the former. Medi 
 aeval Epicureanism became the vogue of her 
 etics, of rationalists, of the Ghibelline parti 
 sans of the independence of the state from 
 church control in Germany and Italy; in 
 France it backed the arm of Philip IV. in his 
 great conflict with pope Boniface VIII. It is 
 implicit in the teachings of John of Jandun 
 and Marsiglio of Padua. The Florentine histo 
 rian Villani 1 records how Florence was twice 
 devastated by fire, once in 1115 and again in 
 1117, and attributes the double calamity to a 
 judgment of God, "forasmuch as the city was 
 evilly corrupted by heresy, among others by 
 the sect of the Epicureans and this plague 
 endured long time in Florence until the com- 
 
 Bk. iv, sec. 30. 
 
 18 
 
ing of the holy religions of St. Francis and of 
 St. Dominic." 1 
 
 The most positive influence, though, of Lu 
 cretius is perceived in the beliefs and prac 
 tices of the sect of the Cathari, the greatest 
 heretical sect of the thirteenth century. It 
 spread all over southern France, and was 
 largely recruited from the industrial classes 
 of the thriving manufacturing towns of Lan- 
 guedoc. 2 
 
 "The youthful perfects of the sect," says 
 De Wulf, "were wont to frequent the schools 
 of Paris or throughout Italy in the later years 
 of the Albigensian period [and] to attack the 
 savants of the Dominican Order . . . The 
 Cathari taught in their psychology that the 
 human spiritus perishes with the body. . . . 
 Their favorite sources were Epicurus and 
 Lucretius, whose materialistic atomism they 
 reproduced. And having disposed to their 
 satisfaction of the immortality of the soul, 
 they boldly denied the doctrine of reward and 
 punishment for good and evil." 3 
 
 1 It is to this sect that Dante alludes in Inferno, 
 canto 10, although the commentators usually take it 
 to be an allusion to Frederick II. and his votaries. 
 So Plumtre and Norton, and Kington-Oliphant, The 
 emperor Frederick II., I, 371. Ozanam, Dante, 6th 
 ed., 1872, p. 48, and Renan, Averroes et averroisme, 
 p. 284, rightly trace the reference to 1115. 
 
 2 See Alphandery, Les idees morales chez les heter- 
 doxes latins au debut du XIHe siecle. 
 
 3 De Wulf, History of Philosophy, pp. 389, 219. 
 For a comprehensive history of the preservation and 
 influence of Lucretius in the Middle Ages see 
 
 19 
 
The result of all this intellectual ferment 
 was a degree of rationalism in the later Middle 
 Ages of which but few are aware. 1 Indeed, 
 in courage and penetration the skepticism of 
 the thirteenth century probably exceeded what 
 is current now. Where to-day is the univer 
 sity professor who would have the hardihood 
 to pronounce the Impossibilia of Siger of 
 Brabant? 2 
 
 That "eternal spirit of the chainless mind" 
 never has been utterly coerced in spite of 
 thrones and dominions, principalities and 
 
 Phillips, Lucrece dans la theologie chretienne du Hie 
 au XIHe siecle, Paris, 1896. A briefer statement is 
 in De Wulf, loc. cit., pp. 59 and 126. Renan, Averroes, 
 etc., pt. II, sec. 12, contains a valuable survey of the 
 history of the introduction of Arabic philosophy into 
 Europe. 
 
 1 For some striking examples see Coulton in Hib- 
 bert Journal, April, 1916, p. 598. 
 
 2 See P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et I aver- 
 roisme latin du XIHe siecle (1911) ; Hist. lit. de la 
 France, XXI, pp. 121-22. 
 
 In Brewer s edition of the Monumenta Franciscana 
 (Rolls Series), vol. I, p. 634, is report of a discussion 
 by some mediaeval students of the question: "Utrum 
 sit Deus?" Cf. Church s translation of Dante, Hell, 
 canto X, p. 79, note 119. The chief Averroistic centres 
 were the University of Paris and the court of Fred 
 erick II. of Hohenstaufen at Salerno. The Paris 
 leaders were Siger of Brabant, Boethius the Dacian, 
 and Bernier of Nivelles. Siger flourished 1266-77. 
 In the latter year he was condemned by the church. 
 Raymond Lull, in order to justify the sentence, com 
 posed a dialogue in which the "philosophici," repre 
 sented by Socrates as interlocutor, were badly handled 
 by the theologians. See Hist. lit. de la France, vol. 
 xxix, p. 333. Dante praises Siger in Paradiso, canto 
 X, 136. 
 
 20 
 
powers, lords spiritual and lords temporal. 
 In every century of the mediaeval era there 
 lived souls who would not be wholly shackled. 1 
 
 1 See the article by Paul Fournier, "Un adversaire 
 inconnu de St. Bernard et de Pierre Lombard," in 
 Bib. de Vecole des chartes, xlvii (1886), p. 394. It 
 is a MS. from the Grande Chartreuse in the library 
 at Grenoble, No. 290 (see Catalogue des manuscrits, 
 Gren. p. 215) entitled Liber de vera philosophic,. 
 Evidently written after 1179, it shows the abiding in 
 fluence of the sect founded by Gilbert de Porree, 
 bishop of Poitiers. "What influence," says Fournier, 
 "this little group had upon the development of the 
 popular heresies which so spread at this time in the 
 south of France is a question which it would be inter 
 esting to resolve, and one which merits the attention 
 of scholars." Bib. de Vecole des chartes, xlvii, p. 417. 
 One of the boldest heretical writers of the time 
 was he our poet? was Vidal de Blois, author of a 
 satire upon scholasticism entitled, "Le livre de Geta 
 et de Birria, ou FAmphitryoneide," written in Latin, 
 of course. He probably lived in the time of Louis IX. 
 of France, but it is not certain that he was a native 
 of Blois. The poem is daringly pro-pagan. One 
 line reads: 
 
 Nil audet magnum qui putet esse deos. 
 This declaration so scandalized Cardinal Mai, who 
 discovered the manuscript in the Vatican Library in 
 1833, that he suppressed it in his edition, without in 
 dicating the lacuna. See his Classici Auctores, vol. 
 V, pp. 463-78. Later editions of this satire are those 
 of Thomas Wright, Early Mysteries, 1838, and of 
 Miiller at Bern, 1840. For other information on 
 Vidal of Blois see Bib. de Vecole des chartes, ser. iv, 
 vol. 5, pp. 474-516; Hist. lit. de la France, XV, pp. 428- 
 34; XXII, pp. 39-50; Journal des Savants, 1886, pp. 
 421-24; Renan, Averroes, etc., p. 283. A sermon of 
 St. Thomas Aquinas delivered July 20, 1270, and 
 severely reflecting on the votaries of pagan philosophy 
 and those who doubted the immortality of the soul, 
 may have been a rejoinder to this poem of Vidal. See 
 Mandonnet, loc. cit., p. 109, note. 
 
 21 
 
The bravest rebels defied and suffered accord 
 ingly. Many such maintained a dual exist 
 ence, like Roger Bacon, outwardly orthodox, 
 but inwardly living their own intellectual and 
 spiritual life, telling few or none their inmost 
 thoughts; sometimes endeavoring to roll the 
 burden off by committing their reflections to 
 secret pages, or writing them in cipher, like a 
 recently discovered manuscript of Bacon. 
 
 What is the function of the heretic? Let 
 Nietzsche answer: 
 
 "The philosopher, as a man indispensable for the 
 morrow and the day after to-morrow, has ever found 
 himself, and has been obliged to find himself, in 
 contradiction to the day in which he lives. His enemy 
 has always been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all 
 those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom 
 one classes as philosophers . . . have found their 
 mission in being the bad conscience of their age. . . . 
 They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, in 
 dolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much 
 falsehood, was concealed under the most venerated 
 types of contemporary morality; how much virtue 
 was outlived." 1 
 
 The same thought has been expressed in other 
 words by the late professor Josiah Royce: 
 
 "Philosophical thought that has never been skepti 
 cal is sure not to be deep. The soul that never has 
 doubted does not know whether it believes. ... A 
 study of history shows that if there is anything that 
 human thought and cultivation have to be thankful 
 for it is an occasional, but truly great and fearless 
 age of doubt." 3 
 
 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 153. 
 
 2 Royce, The Spirit of modern philosophy, p. 7. 
 
 22 
 
Ninety-nine per centum of a man s religion 
 is the result of inheritance and environment. 
 It is the one-hundredth per centum of origin 
 ality that counts. 1 How the unknown author 
 of this poem, cherishing the ideas which he 
 did, and loving the vanished pagan cults so 
 passionately almost as passionately, one 
 might say, as the emperor Julian ten cen 
 turies before him survived in the depth of 
 the Middle Ages, it is well-nigh impossible to 
 conjecture. It is small wonder that his iden 
 tity is not revealed in the manuscript. Even 
 to-day Maeterlinck s works are on the Index 
 of the church of Rome because, to quote from 
 the indictment, 
 
 "he has accepted the fiat of the destructive criti 
 cism of science. For him religion is a city laid waste, 
 God is a myth as completely dethroned as Jupiter 
 Olympus; Christianity is a discredited system rele 
 gated to the regions of exploded beliefs with the 
 crumbled theogonies of Greece and Babylon." 
 
 What would Rome have done with this poet 
 had it discovered him in a century when the 
 inquisition was at its height? 
 
 The unknown author of the poem whose 
 discovery has been related was one whose 
 taste and quality of thought made him a 
 "Strayed Reveller" out of antiquity into the 
 scholastic period, a veritable pagan in the age 
 of dogmatic theology. Who he was I mean 
 
 The thought is Coulton s, in Hibbert Journal, 
 April, 1916, p. 593. 
 
 23 
 
his name I do not know. When he lived 
 can only be conjectured from internal evi 
 dence in the poem; that he was French by 
 birth is certain, and he was surely a cleric. 
 Judging from a striking allusion to "the 
 granite piles of Carnac" and a reference to 
 "Atlantic s surge" he may have been a Breton. 1 
 He must have lived in the thirteenth century. 
 His enthusiastic allusion to Aristotle s phil 
 osophy, which was condemned by the church 
 in 1210, makes one think that he was writing 
 when ecclesiastical authority was vainly try 
 ing to seal the books of the great Stagirite to 
 Europe s increasingly inquiring mind. 2 A 
 reference to the Lateran shows that the poem 
 must have been composed before the fall of 
 Boniface in 1303, before the removal of the 
 papacy to Avignon. But the most conclusive 
 evidence as to the time when the author lived 
 is offered by the striking allusion to the pyra 
 mids, which could hardly have been so vividly 
 mentioned before St. Louis of France s ill- 
 starred expedition to Egypt in 1248. The 
 reference is so fresh that it is almost impos 
 sible not to think of it as derived from first- 
 
 1 Brittany to-day is the most intensely catholic por 
 tion of France. But this Catholicism dates from the 
 seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages Brittany 
 was notorious for the active influence of many ves 
 tiges of ancient paganism. See the thesis of Camille 
 Vallaux, La Basse-Bretagne, Paris, 1907. 
 
 2 On Aristotle in the Middle Ages see De Wulf, 
 loc. cit., pp. 251-53. 
 
 24 
 
hand observation, or at least from one who 
 had seen the pyramids with his own eyes. 
 
 There are things in the poem of which 
 Dante, too, makes mention. Each alludes to 
 the legend that pope Gregory the Great de 
 plored that so good a man as the Roman em 
 peror Trajan, because he was a heathen, was 
 not saved. But such allusions are mere acci 
 dental identities. Modern research has shown 
 the improbability of Dante ever having been 
 in Paris or elsewhere outside of Italy. More 
 over, Dante was born in 1265 and died in 
 1321. His great poem was not given to the 
 world until close to the end of his life. Our 
 poet, I am sure, lived and died in the thir 
 teenth century. There is one allusion, though, 
 which teases out of thought: 
 
 "Nam etiam tenebris immersum Tartaron atra 
 In lucem de node vocant." * 
 
 Did the poet know Dante s Inferno? I think 
 not. It is the protest of outraged intelligence 
 against popular belief in a material hell of 
 fire and brimstone. The spirit and temper of 
 this poem are absolutely antithetic to Dante. 2 
 The temper is pagan Greek of the fourth cen 
 tury, it is that of Julian and the dying gods. 
 Whoever the author was, he read and cher- 
 
 1 "For there are those who summon hell itself into 
 daylight out of black night and the gulf of shadows." 
 
 2 The way in which Dante looked upon the " pagan 
 ism" of the court of Frederick II. is evidence of this. 
 See Hell, canto X. 
 
 25 
 
ished in his secret soul Lucretius noble poem, 
 De rerum natura, the Meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius, the Astronomicon of Manilius, Ver 
 gil, and Aristotle s philosophy. Aristotle was, 
 of course, by the thirteenth century, available 
 in Latin version through the medium of 
 Arabic and Jewish scholarship. The same is 
 true of Plato and Neo-Platonic thought, es 
 pecially Plotinus, whose influence is apparent 
 in parts of the poem. 1 
 
 The problem presented by the undoubted 
 
 1 Most of these authors are too well known to need 
 more than mention. But a word may be in point 
 about Manilius. He lived in the reign of Augustus, 
 being younger than Lucretius and a contemporary of 
 Vergil. His poem, in five books of hexameter verse, 
 is an astrological treatise abounding in zodiacal allu 
 sions and mathematical terms like triangles, hexa 
 gons, dodecatemories, and the dodecatemories of 
 dodecatemories. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent 
 absurdity, it is a sober and serious work which well 
 repays reading. Goethe, perhaps the greatest of 
 modern pagans, knew Manilius well and inscribed 
 four of his lines in the Visitors Book on the heights 
 of the Brocken, Sept. 4, 1784: 
 
 Impendendus homo est, deus esse ut possit in ipso; 
 Quis dubitet post haec hominem conjungere coelo? 
 Quin coelum posset nisi coeli munere nosse? 
 Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars deorum est? 
 
 Man must be weighed as if there were a god in him. 
 
 Who will hesitate to link man with heaven? 
 
 Who can know heaven save by the boon of heaven? 
 
 Who can find out God save one who has a portion 
 with the gods? 
 
 See Kramer, Ort und Zeit der Abfassung der 
 Astronomic des Manilius, p. 24; Ellis, Nodes 
 Manilianae, p. viii. 
 
 26 
 
use of Marcus Aurelius Meditations by this 
 unknown author is a difficult and fascinating 
 one. Hitherto scholars have been absolutely 
 certain that the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius 
 were unknown to any writer in the Latin West 
 in the Middle Ages, and the same conviction 
 
 Two of the five books of Manillas have recently been 
 edited with great erudition by Mr. A. E. Housman, 
 who is both a Latin scholar and a poet, and an Eng 
 lish translation of the second book published by Mr. 
 H. W. Garrod, of Merton College, Oxford. The former 
 says of Manilius: 
 
 "The last of the poets to feel the impulsion of the 
 furor arduus of philosophic speculation, he addresses 
 himself with arresting insistency to men in whom the 
 age-long fact of social and moral confusion had well 
 nigh killed faith in an order of the universe .... 
 [he hadl an unconquerable conviction of the para- 
 mountcy of reason . . . [and] a singular freedom 
 from superstition. ... In his detachment from su 
 perstition and in the lofty expression which he gives 
 to this freedom, Manilius is the peer of Lucretius." 
 And Mr. Garrod: "No one of the poets of stoicism 
 has heard more clearly the call of the universe to its 
 children or felt more powerfully the homesickness of 
 humanity aspiring to a reunion with that which is 
 divine." Introd., xii. 
 
 The most famous Jewish Neo-Platonist in the 
 Middle Ages was Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, born at 
 Malaga in Spain, 1021, died 1070. 
 
 "His poetry is characterized by its finish of form 
 and loftiness of thought. His poems are mostly seri 
 ous, sometimes gloomy. The most important of these 
 is his Royal Crown ( Kether Malkuth ), a religio- 
 philosophical meditation, which has been translated 
 into almost every European language. Many of his 
 numerous religious poems have been incorporated in 
 the Jewish liturgy. Of his philosophical works, 
 written in Arabic, the principal one is the "Fountain 
 of Life," based on the Neoplatonic system. Its Latin 
 
 27 
 
is attached to the history of Manilius Astro- 
 nomicon. Our knowledge of both of them 
 goes no further back than the fifteenth cen 
 tury. But this view must now be revised, for 
 at least one bright spirit knew and loved their 
 works in the thirteenth century. So far as we 
 have positive knowledge, the philosophy of 
 Marcus Aurelius was not known to the Latin 
 West in the Middle Ages. 1 No mediaeval Latin 
 
 translation, Fons Vitae is often quoted by Albert 
 the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno, and 
 others. He also wrote an ethical work, "Introduction 
 for the Attaining of Good Habits of the Soul" 
 OTikun Midoth ha-Nefesh ), and a collection of 
 proverbs ("Selection of Pearls," Mibhar ha-Peni- 
 nim )." (From Century Dictionary of Names.) 
 
 There is an excellent article upon him in the last 
 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 
 1 " The complete work was possibly left behind at 
 Rome in safe keeping. After the death of Marcus 
 some friendly hand whether of Pompeianus or Vic- 
 torinus or Severus rescued it from its unworthy sur 
 roundings under Commodus and gave it to the world. 
 Perhaps this inestimable service was performed by a 
 daughter, Cornificia, whose only utterance that has 
 come down to us breathes the spirit of her father s 
 Thoughts. . . . Posterity had indeed cause to bless 
 the unknown benefactor who caused to be published 
 this Megalophelestaton Biblion. But it does not seem 
 to have attracted much attention at the time, or for 
 centuries after. We can trace it but fitfully through 
 the ages, as known to one here and there, to a Them- 
 istius, an Arethas, a Suidas, a Tzetzes. Hardly did 
 it win through to our own days in one MS. now lost 
 and in another that is incomplete, and it narrowly 
 escaped the fate of coming to us merely as disjecta 
 membra in one of those anthologies which we owe 
 to the moths of history, the excerptors and epito- 
 mizers." C. R. Haines, "The composition and chron- 
 
 28 
 
translation of the Meditations is mentioned by 
 any western writer; the earliest known manu 
 script, now lost, was in the original Greek and 
 came to light during the Renaissance. Even 
 the internal evidence in the writings of the 
 great philosophic and religious authors of the 
 Middle Age affords no clue that they had any 
 knowledge, direct or indirect, of the Medita 
 tions. Yet the indebtedness of our poet to him 
 is very large and very evident. He must have 
 had a now lost and unmentioned Latin version 
 of the Meditations in his hand, for it is almost 
 impossible to think that he had a first-hand 
 knowledge of Greek and had the Greek ori 
 ginal before him, although modern research 
 has shown that a knowledge of Greek in the 
 West in the Middle Ages was deeper and 
 broader than was once supposed. 1 It is cer 
 tainly of moment in the intellectual history of 
 Europe that even one mediaeval scholar has 
 been found who was familiar with the writings 
 of the only philosopher who ever sate upon a 
 throne. We have here a new tribute to the 
 perennial vigor of the Neo-Stoic philosophy. 
 In every century since its birth the Stoic 
 philosophy, or what is more usually known 
 as Neo-Stoicism, has had some followers. No 
 
 ology of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," Journal 
 of Phil, xxxiii, 1914, pp. 294-95. Cf. Harris Kendall s 
 translation of the Meditations, introd., p. cxv, and 
 pp. 17 note, and 201. 
 
 1 See De Wulf, History of mediaeval philosophy, 
 pp. 167-68, and especially pp. 243-47. 
 
 29 
 
philosophy covers the whole case of the soul. 
 But men rise on the stepping-stones which 
 other seekers after God have laid. 1 
 
 Erasmus said of Seneca: "If you read him 
 like a Christian, he wrote like a heathen. If 
 you read him like a heathen, he wrote like a 
 Christian." Mr. Edwyn Bevan has written : 
 
 "If some of the most cultured Christian converts 
 like Justin and Augustine have passed into the church 
 through the portals of the Stoic philosophy in the 
 past, not a few of our modern thinkers have passed 
 through the open door of the church into the porch 
 of Neo-Stoicism, i.e., the application of the inculca 
 tions of duty to humanity as a living organism. . . . 
 Neo-Stoicism owes not a little of its content, its earn 
 estness, its moral ardour, to the influence of early 
 Christian nurture." 2 
 
 1 St. Ambrose " was strongly influenced by the popu 
 lar morality of Ciceronian Stoicism, which was wide 
 spread among cultured western Christians, and which 
 had, by its combination *with monastic morality, 
 brought about, in Pelagianism, the crisis so decisive 
 for the dogmatics of the west." Harnack, History of 
 Dogma, V, p. 49. 
 
 [Pelagianism] "is the consistent outcome of the 
 Christian rationalism that had long been wide spread 
 in the west especially among the more cultured that 
 had been nourished by the popular philosophy in 
 fluenced by Stoicism and Aristotelianism, and had 
 by means of Julian [of Eclanum] received a bias to 
 Stoic naturalism." Harnack, Ibid., V, p. 172. 
 
 2 Quarterly Review, June, 1910. Mr. Bevan is in 
 error in this paragraph with regard to Augustine. 
 "Louis Gourdon, Essai sur la conversion de St. 
 Augustine, Paris, 1900, has shown by an analysis of 
 Augustine s writings immediately after his conver 
 sion [A. D. 398] that the account he gives in the 
 Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden 
 marked a definitive conversion from his former life, 
 
 30 
 
The influence of Stoicism upon early Chris 
 tianity is very interesting. A prefect of Con 
 stantinople, in the reign of the emperor 
 Arcadius [395-408], weary of the world, 
 retired to the solitude of the monastery of 
 Mount Sinai and transmuted the Thoughts of 
 Epictetus into a manual of devotion and dis 
 cipline for the monks of the monastery. 1 
 Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, in the twelfth 
 century, composed a Stoic treatise entitled 
 Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, in imi 
 tation of Cicero s Offices, in which, with glori 
 ous disregard of history, he made Cicero and 
 Seneca the interlocutors. In the preface of 
 this work 2 he says that he was led in a dream 
 to endeavor to formulate the philosophic 
 thought of antiquity, and that in the dream 
 he was told that Cicero was the greatest moral 
 ist of the pagan world. 3 Hildebert followed 
 
 but it was to the Neo-Platonic spiritualism, and only 
 a halfway stage towards Christianity. The latter he 
 appears not fully and radically to have embraced 
 until four years more had passed." William James, 
 The varieties of religious experience, p. 171 note. 
 
 1 Zanta, La renaissance du stoicisme au XV I e siecle, 
 Paris, 1914, pp. 124-28. 
 
 2 In Migne, Patrolog. Lat., vol. 171, cols. 1003-51. 
 
 3 Moralium dogma philosophorum per multa disper- 
 sum volumina contrahere meditabar repente somnus 
 obrepsit, statumque, ut fit, solo animi augurio primum 
 ilium esse Latinae eloquentiae auctorem Tullium mihi 
 innotuit; post quern ille moralitatis eruditior elegan- 
 tissimus Seneca, cum quibusdam aliis. 
 
 For further on this interesting treatise see Zanta, 
 loc. cit., p. 127, and Picavet, Histoire comparee des 
 philosophies medievales, Paris, 1907, ch. vii. 
 
 31 
 
Cicero s division of the subject rigidly. So, 
 too, John of Salisbury, in the same century, 
 in his Policraticus, treated the problem of 
 providence after the Stoic manner. 
 
 Erasmus, Calvin, and Zwingli admired 
 Seneca more than any other ancient writer. 
 Epictetus was the admiration of Montaigne, 
 and a famous hero of protestantism in the six 
 teenth century declared that the world could 
 well get along without any books except the 
 Bible, Seneca, and Epictetus. Between the 
 inevitability of Stoicism and the determin 
 ism or, to put it theologically, the predes 
 tination of Calvinism, there seems to have 
 been a certain sympathy. 1 
 
 But Stoicism has appealed to others besides 
 Renaissance pagans and Calvinist theologians. 
 Sir Thomas Brown and Spinoza show its in 
 fluence. What Aubrey de Vere has finely 
 called 
 
 "The soul s marmoreal calmness" 
 appealed to Wordsworth, too. Walt Whit 
 man is saturated with Stoicism. John Ad- 
 dington Symonds wrote: 
 
 " In these difficulties I fall back on a kind of stoical 
 mysticism on the prayer of Cleanthes (which is 
 graven on his tomb), the proem of Goethe s Gott und 
 die Welt, the phrase of Faust, 
 
 Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren, 
 the almost brutal optimism of Walt Whitman s 
 I cry to the cosmos, Though thou slay me, yet will 
 I trust in thee. 
 
 ^ee Mr. Bevan s development of this idea in 
 Quarterly Review, June, 1910, p. 571. 
 
 32 
 
Can a religion be constructed out of these elements? 
 Not a tangible one, perhaps; nothing communicable 
 to another s heart. But a religious mood of mind 
 may be engendered sufficient for the purpose of living 
 not ignobly." 
 
 The greatest of the world s philosophies yet 
 are less "broken lights" than iridescent parts 
 of that "dome of many-colored glass" which 
 "stains the white radiance of eternity." Ten 
 nyson makes Ulysses say that he is a part of 
 all he meets. But we are more than that. 
 We are part of all who have gone before, and 
 lived and thought before us. The "thought 
 less drift of the deciduous years" may cover 
 the individual. But really great thoughts 
 rarely perish utterly. It is as Goethe has 
 written 
 
 "Heard are the voices, 
 Heard are the sages, 
 The worlds and the ages." 
 
 Of all the philosophic writings which have 
 survived from antiquity I think there is no 
 doubt that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 
 hold the palm for popularity in modern times. 
 Epictetus is his only rival. Plato is unto the 
 Platonists; Aristotle unto the Aristotelians; 
 Plotinus unto the Neo-Platonists; Lucretius 
 unto not the pessimists, but clear and 
 rugged thinkers who are not afraid. 1 In the 
 
 1 " Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decay, of 
 failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts? [Is 
 there not] an intellectual predilection for what is 
 hard, awful, evil, problematical?" Nietzsche, Birth 
 of Tragedy, p. 2. 
 
 33 
 
Roman world of the end of the second century 
 the two chief powers making for righteous 
 ness were Stoicism and Christianity. Fortu 
 nately for the enduring fame of Marcus 
 Aurelius as a philosopher he lived in an age 
 of transition when Stoicism had freed itself 
 from its earlier almost adamantine hardness, 
 without losing its primitive ruggedness of 
 character, and had imbibed some of the ethe 
 real softness of Neo-Platonism, and perhaps 
 of Christianity, too. 1 It is this transitional 
 nature of Aurelius thought which makes him 
 a connecting link between ancient pagan Stoic 
 philosophy and Christianity, and gives his 
 Meditations such a remarkable popularity 
 among serious-minded men even to-day. The 
 charm which this unique soliloquy, originally 
 written for no eyes save those of the author, 
 has for men who live for 
 
 "The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the poet s dream," 
 
 is a very wonderful one. It is said of Leo 
 XIII. that when he was dying and his mind 
 wandered, the watchers around his bed heard 
 him repeat over and over again the golden 
 
 1 " Marcus Aurelius has traveled far from the Cynic 
 and earlier Stoic conception of man as a self-sufficing 
 unit, without quite attaining the Christian ideal, 
 which declares that he can only find his higher self 
 in and through the development of the higher self in 
 others." Alston, Christianity and Stoicism in the 
 second century, p. 9. 
 
 34 
 
sentences of the Meditations. "It is one in 
 stance out of many of the persistent influence 
 of Stoicism and its undiminished fascination 
 for the nobleminded of any creed, or no creed, 
 in almost every age or country of the civilized 
 world." 1 Spedding called Edward Fitzgerald 
 "the prince of quietists," and said that "his 
 tranquility was like a pirated copy of the 
 peace of God." Fitzgerald was not a pro 
 fessed Stoic; neither was this mediaeval poet 
 of ours. But each leans hard upon the Stoic 
 philosophy, nevertheless, and the tranquility 
 of each has a striking resemblance to that of 
 the Stoics. 
 
 Whoever our author was, he was one of 
 those men not brave enough outwardly to defy 
 the church s authority; yet true sufficiently to 
 himself at least to tend the flame of the light 
 within his own soul. Thereby he gained a 
 spiritual tranquility within which neutralized 
 the narcotic effect of outward compromise and 
 conformity. While his poem is partly tinc 
 tured with the lofty scorn of Lucretius, and 
 much with the tonic quality of the Stoic phil 
 osophy and the spirit of the Aristotelian man 
 of inquiring mind, yet it is also imbued with 
 the softer mysticism of Neo-Platonism. But, 
 above all, the poem is pervaded with a ration 
 alism, a scientific quality of mind, rare almost 
 to the point of non-existence in the Middle 
 Ages. Whoever the author was he looked at 
 
 Bevan, loc. cit., p. 563. 
 35 
 
things with level eyes and in the calm light 
 of reason. He may have outwardly con 
 formed to the precepts of Holy Church, but 
 inwardly he was a free spirit. To him 
 
 "Stone walls did not a prison make, 
 Nor iron bars a cage." 
 
 The authority of the church had no binding 
 force upon his imagination or meditation. 1 
 
 He was a pure individualist. The mass- 
 weight of mankind had no force for him. To 
 him the religion of the time was a vulgar 
 superstition. For him religion had to be, not 
 a mass of credulous beliefs, but a philosophy. 
 He had that antiseptic quality of mind which 
 refused to accept a teaching which violated 
 his intelligence and his reason. He refused 
 to believe doctrines totally incapable of 
 proof. He knew that instinct proves nothing, 
 or everything, as one chooses, and that the 
 argument derived from it is a fallacy. 
 
 But I must bring this introduction, already 
 too long, to an end. Instead of being a porch 
 through which the reader might enter into the 
 poem, I fear that I have made it a peristyle 
 instead. In the usual acceptation of the word, 
 perhaps, this poem may hardly be called a 
 translation. While I have often translated 
 
 1 " Learning alters us ... But at the bottom of 
 our souls . . . there is certainly something unteach- 
 able, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined 
 decision and answer to predetermined, chosen ques 
 tions." Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 181. 
 
 36 
 
literally, I have not infrequently paraphrased 
 the thought. The Latin language was capable 
 of a density, a terseness of expression, which 
 the English tongue rarely possesses in the 
 same degree; on the other hand, a mediaeval 
 writer was usually inclined to be turgid. This 
 double characteristic of the original has some 
 times led me to expansion, sometimes to con 
 traction of the thought. There are a few 
 stanzas which have no absolute equivalent in 
 the original ; these are rather summings up of 
 the author s feelings than literal reproduc 
 tions of his language. In no case can they be 
 considered as foreign to his mind. For they 
 are in entire harmony with other liberal 
 thought of the time. Sir Rennel Rodd, in his 
 recently published delightful translations 
 from the Greek anthology, 1 has written: "Of 
 the quality of verse translation there are many 
 tests: the closeness with which the intention 
 and atmosphere of the original has been main 
 tained; the absence of extraneous additions; 
 the omission of no essential feature; and the 
 interpretation, by such equivalent as most ade 
 quately corresponds, of individualities of style 
 and assonances of language. But not the 
 least essential justification of poetical trans 
 lation is that the version shall constitute a 
 poem on its own account." 
 
 I plead guilty to my critics, of sins both of 
 omission and of commission, if this be the 
 
 *Love, Worship, and Death, London, 1916. 
 37 
 
canon law of the translator ; for no one knows 
 better than I how far I have fallen short of 
 the ideals here expressed. But one hope I 
 still cherish, namely, that my poem constitutes 
 a poem in form, in subject, and in spirit 
 that it is a poem in spirit and in truth. 
 
 The metre of the original, as said before, 
 is hexameter. But hexameter, even when 
 written by a master in English, fails of the 
 effect its usage possesses in the classic tongue. 
 Mr. W. H. Mallock some years ago gave to the 
 world of the few who were fortunate enough 
 to discover it a translation of parts of Lucre 
 tius rendered into the verse-form of Fitz 
 gerald s Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam.^ The 
 success of his experiment has emboldened me 
 to court failure by trying to use the same verse 
 structure for this poem. I realize how rash 
 and perhaps impossible a thing it is which 
 I have endeavored to do. 
 
 Benson, in his Life of Edward Fitzgerald, 
 has said: "There is a certain priestly mood 
 which falls upon those in whom the need for 
 creating what is beautiful is very imperious." 
 This study has been a labor of love with me 
 for several years. In order to understand and 
 to feel the spirit of the theme I have atten- 
 
 1 W. H. Mallock, Lucretius on Life and Death, Lon 
 don, John Lane, 1900. Mr. Paul E. More has pub 
 lished in the Nation of November 30, 1916, six 
 stanzas, in Fitzgerald s verse form, of a translation of 
 the Bhagavadgita. 
 
 38 
 
lively read the history of the most important 
 forerunners and rivals of Christianity, and 
 may I say it without pretentiousness? some 
 gleams of the piercing spiritual beauty of 
 those ancient pagan cults seem to have illu 
 minated the page as I have written. Two 
 lines, which every reader will recognize, have 
 been borrowed directly from Matthew Arnold 
 and Tennyson. I have used them because 
 they quite exactly express the sense of the 
 Latin lines, while the beauty of their form 
 imparts a charm to " the argument of mine 
 afflicted stile." 
 
 In the copious notes which are appended 
 to the text of the poem, I have endeavored to 
 trace back every line and every allusion to 
 what I believe to have been the original source 
 of the poet s thought, whether in mediaeval or 
 ancient literature, or in the Bible. 
 
 39 
 
PROEM 
 
 Where the stately poplars quiver 
 
 In the sinuous Seine river, 
 
 Winding slow through poppied ridges, 
 
 Underneath old Paris bridges 
 
 T is of mediaeval time 
 
 This my rhyme 
 
 Dwelt a youth of clerkly ways 
 
 Delving days, 
 And many a weary night 
 By the taper s flickering light 
 
 Over monkish Latin lore, 
 
 Volumes hoar. 
 
 Dry and musty was the quaint old 
 Knowledge saint-told, 
 Stored within the books unscanned 
 
 Neath his hand. 
 He was weary of the query 
 
 Of the schoolmen s mind; 
 And his thought bent in its yearning 
 To the learning 
 
 Of the world long years behind, 
 For his brain seethed with the dreaming 
 
 And the teeming 
 Thoughts which faster, vaster, 
 
 From the master 
 Minds of eld unto him came. 
 
 41 
 
THE POEM 
 
 It came, what time I dwelt in fair Lutece, 
 In student fellowship cloistered place 
 Of high renown and sweet illusionments, 
 Sorbonne, how dear and beautiful thy face. 
 
 II 
 
 A voice came crying to me on the wind: 
 "Shut to thy books, nor suffer thou thy mind 
 
 To be distraught by vain philosophers, 
 For they be all blind leaders of the blind. 
 
 Ill 
 
 "All vision has become a book that s sealed 
 To those who ever plough that sterile field. 
 
 Write thou this vision, for in days to come 
 Thy spirit s fruit an hundred fold shall yield." 
 
 IV 
 
 The wind that through the keyhole blew said: "Lo, 
 Thy teachers have no wisdom to bestow; 
 
 Those hooded monks tell all their thoughts like beads." 
 Untouched the door sprang wide and bade me "Go." 
 
 43 
 
V 
 
 The time of any man is little space 
 Methinks; his spot of sojourn but a place 
 
 Apart, and history an ocean marge 
 Whence mightiest waves retreat without a trace. 
 
 VI 
 
 Days, seasons, places, heroes and events 
 Fade and dissolve, and leave no lineaments. 
 
 The granite piles of Carnac and the Sphinx 
 Tell me, sage, whose are these monuments? 
 
 VII 
 
 Beneath the weight of Egypt s pyramid 
 The sombre chambers of the dead are hid; 
 
 Vast galleries and funeral rooms of rock 
 Whose silence human footsteps never thrid. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Unconscious monuments of vanished might 
 Frown from the gloom there and the night affright; 
 
 Pride, kingdom, power in every one of those 
 Grim visages of carven diorite. 
 
 IX 
 
 Who of those bones proprietaries were? 
 
 Whose frames those ashes formed? Canst thou aver? 
 
 Or when the persons of those relics there 
 Entered the fastness of that sepulchre? 
 
 44 
 
X 
 
 As soon find Moses tomb on Beth-peor; 
 Tell me, what name, when hid, Achilles bore; 
 
 Which of the isles blind Homer s birth-place was; 
 What sang the temptress sirens from the shore. 
 
 XI 
 
 How futile is that awful pomp of death 
 Even for a day to stretch the vanished breath! 
 
 The mystery of death is doubly veiled 
 Where Egypt s hoary grandeur slumbereth. 
 
 XII 
 
 Long lasting memory, how few do find; 
 Oblivion scatters poppy as though blind. 
 
 The epitaph of Hadrian s horse survives 
 That purple Caesar s fame among mankind. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Whether the best of men be known or not, 
 Or if there be not greater names forgot 
 
 Than those emblazoned on the walls of time 
 This is a riddle none can solve, I wot. 
 
 XIV 
 
 Cyrus and Alexander, Caesar three 
 Who held the homage of the world in fee 
 
 Were fain to part with their own lives at last: 
 How mightier than mightiest are we? 
 
 45 
 
XV 
 
 How many men innumerable think! 
 Journeyed aforetime to that selfsame brink 
 
 Before and since those great ones trod the earth? 
 Think you that you shall float while others sink? 
 
 XVI 
 
 Sic transit gloria mundi: those long dead 
 And those late passed all sleep in the same bed. 
 
 The years of many generations blend 
 Pope, peasant, prince, when buried. 
 
 XVII 
 
 The years seem long when they from us are far; 
 But come, they vanish swiftly as a star 
 
 That rends the veil of darkness in the night 
 Like flash of some bright angel s scimitar. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 The fame men prize is oft oblivion; 
 Kings are but shadows on a spectre-throne; 
 
 Sceptre and crown are baubles of an hour. 
 Is there, to human life, a corner-stone? 
 
 XIX 
 
 The beautiful is oft untimely gone; 
 
 The rose dies with the day that bloomed at dawn. 
 
 And yet, what difference to thee or me 
 In the immensity of time out-drawn? 
 
 46 
 
XX 
 
 Life is an archway through whose aperture 
 Into illimitable lands obscure 
 
 The endless files of mankind ceaselessly 
 Do march. Whence? Whither? Why? Ah, who is sure? 
 
 XXI 
 
 Go, pace the sand beside Atlantic s surge, 
 And see the sun sink slowly neath the verge, 
 
 Out on the luminous horizon far 
 Where sky and watery waste together merge. 
 
 XXII 
 
 So sinks the soul. But does it rise once more 
 In some new East? Upon some other shore? 
 
 Like amarant, immortal in the dark, 
 Or kneel eternally by some barred door? 
 
 XXIII 
 
 Far inland from the sea the rosy shell 
 Harbors the lingering sound of ocean swell; 
 
 No still small voice within my inmost heart 
 To me of past or future life doth tell. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 Man s life is of man s life the whole, not part. 
 Eternity is long, life short. Thou art 
 
 A mere mote swimming in the deeps of space. 
 Men die, gods die, the soul dies with the heart. 
 
 47 
 
XXV 
 
 What boots it all at last when we are done? 
 What boots the day when sunken is the sun? 
 
 What then remains of man s much vaunted power, 
 When all the water in the glass is run? 
 
 XXVI 
 
 The world s face has grown grey in quest of truth. 
 More time has been consumed than Rome, in sooth, 
 
 To conquer and to rule the world required; 
 And still the riddle riddles age and youth. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 What was I ere my life began? None knows. 
 Where was I? Was I any where? Where goes 
 The soul at death? Is birth a waking dream 
 And death a swoon? Alas, the riddle grows. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 No one can answer where or whither, what 
 Or how or why. We are and then are not. 
 
 The world s wheel like a potter s disk revolves, 
 Moulding our clay into some jar or pot, 
 
 XXIX 
 
 Or vase, or thick flat plate, or bowl 
 Mankind is fashioned as the seasons roll: 
 
 Some clean and bright and shining chalices, 
 Some vessels of dishonour without soul. 
 
XXX 
 
 Who is the masterful Artificer? 
 
 Where is the pit from which we digged were, 
 
 That He might mould us from that neutral clay? 
 Did life on ocean s fertile floor first stir? 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Life s an uncharted sea, whose shore 
 All we, in vain, from East to West explore, 
 Pacing a few stades off in yearly course: 
 Of the great sea of life we know no more. 
 
 XXXII 
 
 What of that unknown and mysterious tract 
 Of life environing material fact? 
 
 Where God forever walks across the deep? 
 Blind, blind are we, each in his puny act 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 Absorbed. What will it profit us, the world 
 With all its sordid goods to have unfurled, 
 
 And forfeit of life s richest birthright make? 
 To dig for dross where full life lies impearled? 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 Our years are but an interval, of long 
 
 Or shorter time, which some men spend in wrong, 
 
 And some in listlessness, and some for wealth: 
 The wise alone seek truth and art and song. 
 
 49 
 
XXXV 
 
 I ve read somewhere that Gregory the Great 
 Or was it Augustine? deplored the fate 
 
 (Because, forsooth, the heathen all are damned) 
 That Trajan barred from the celestial gate. 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 Dear God! Those ancient faiths once suckled souls 
 As great as those the Lateran controls. 
 
 Aye, greater. Deep of stream those spirits were: 
 We puny creatures cling unto the shoals, 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 Afraid to launch out to the deeps which call 
 Because the terrors of the church appall, 
 
 By self -authoritative priests imposed; 
 The bishops have made cowards of us all. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 Deaf with mortality s loud-clanking chain, 
 They only rouse my fierce wrath and disdain, 
 
 With saints excess-of-good-works, or with gifts, 
 Who commerce make of souls, heaven to attain. 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 Alas, that mankind, searching for the right, 
 Scarce in the wide world finds a glimmering light. 
 Shame on those shameless ones who summon Hell 
 Out of the gulf of shadows and of night. 
 
 50 
 
XL 
 
 Life is a struggle in the dark to hosts 
 Of men, who fight mere shadows and the ghosts 
 
 Of their imaginations. They are like 
 Scared sailors wrecked upon barbarian coasts. 
 
 XLI 
 
 There is an inward sky within the mind 
 Wider than measurement of sense defined, 
 
 Whose stars are thoughts transcending far and free 
 The grovelling mysteries of priestly kind. 
 
 XLII 
 
 The open mind is born of God, but these 
 Who vaunt the power of ghostly mysteries 
 
 To bind and loose and thrall the mind, are false 
 Hierophants of fabled destinies. 
 
 ******* 
 
 XLIII 
 
 T is strange to me, as here I write, to think 
 That most among my friends par Dieu! would shrink 
 
 From me as heretic, if they but knew, 
 And deem my soul as vile as this black ink. 
 
 XLIV 
 
 They each and all belong to Holy Church. 
 My touch is foul and would their garments smirch, 
 
 Did they but know. . . . I wonder: Are they right? 
 // they are right my soul is in the lurch. 
 
 51 
 
XLV 
 
 Well, souls of most men narrow houses are; 
 Thin tenements whose mud walls bear the scar 
 Of sordid, wretched, noisome lives that crawl 
 Thereon like flies. My soul would be a star. 
 
 XLVI 
 
 Man s life is from man s world a thing apart. 
 Do you the riddle guess? Within his heart 
 
 Abides his own real life. Abroad, he grants 
 The world s demands, with superficial art. 
 
 XLVII 
 
 The tide of time is at the ebb, and slack; 
 Stagnant is thought; the taste of life is brack. 
 
 The prayer of Samson was for light my cry: 
 "Would that Time s ancient tide were surging back." 
 
 XLVIII 
 
 As soon expect to sow the sea with oats, 
 Or sail the ripened fields in keeled boats, 
 
 Find fish on land or camels in the stars, 
 Round to be square, kids lambs, that iron floats. 
 
 XLIX 
 
 Why does the church harass a driven leaf? 
 Or feed men thorns when corn is in the sheaf? 
 
 Give stones for bread and water for red wine? 
 The way to God is long and life is brief. 
 
 52 
 
L 
 
 Proverbs of ashes, pious words of old, 
 Dark sayings of the fathers slimed with mould, 
 
 Lives of saints, silly miracles and cant 
 Daily to us for nourishment are doled. 
 
 LI 
 
 Olympus gods, thou Rome, hast seen retire; 
 Zeus and Adonis like a dream expire; 
 Glory depart from Ida; Dian s fane 
 In ruin fall, and perish Vesta s fire; 
 
 LII 
 
 The high gods die like butterflies in frost; 
 The glorious lore of Greece for ages lost. 
 
 What wilt thou say before the bar of God? 
 Christian Rome, dear to mankind thy cost. 
 
 LIII 
 
 Charlatan and masquer! Sorceress! 
 Base trickster of humanity s distress! 
 
 Avenging Time shall yet take toll of thee, 
 And shrink thy terrors into nothingness. 
 
 LIV 
 
 Age after age s cumulated wrong 
 
 Like a dread storm on thee shall break ere long. 
 
 Orbis ecclesiarum caput Rome, 
 Thou shalt yet be like some long vanished song. 
 
 53 
 
LV 
 
 Temples and churches close beside the mart, 
 Rondured by exercise of every art 
 
 Groined arches, chancels, painted glass, attest 
 The yearning hunger of the human heart. 
 
 LVI 
 
 Yet will I not their god adore until 
 The sky looks down on ruined wall and sill, 
 On empty courts and grey cathedral aisles 
 Ecclesia dum fuerit Nihil. 
 
 LVII 
 
 When desolation strikes their thresholds bare, 
 And wild birds lodge in broken chapiter, 
 
 When wolves howl in the hollow vaults below 
 When Holy Church is dead, I shall go there. 
 
 ******* 
 
 LVIH 
 
 Men s thoughts alternate, moon-like wax and wane; 
 Life swims in circles; heart-tides, like the main, 
 
 Though wandered far in split and tortuous streams, 
 Shoreward recurrent yet shall turn again. 
 
 LIX 
 
 Basil and Julian be both now dead; 
 Hypatia and Cyrillus buried; 
 
 The Golden-Mouthed and Diocletian 
 Victor and vanquished in the selfsame bed. 
 
 54 
 
LX 
 
 Poor work it is to jeer a fallen foe. 
 The pagan seers have vanished long ago 
 
 Into the arms of that great silence which 
 Forbids us all its mysteries to know. 
 
 LXI 
 
 Are we more certain of the soul than they? 
 Is bishop better than a flamen? Say 
 
 Whether the quality of life be raised, 
 Or if the world be happier to-day. 
 
 LXII 
 
 For me Aurelius austere atmosphere 
 Breathes the idea of deity more clear 
 Than sensuous emotion, mummery, 
 Or gorgeous ritual to church so dear. 
 
 LXIII 
 
 Religion was the worship of the soul 
 With him; entire surrender to control 
 
 By what man s highest reason can divine: 
 "He saw life steadily and saw it whole." 
 
 LXIV 
 
 He built religion on a noble scheme 
 Of perfect consecration and the dream; 
 
 Philosophy and poetry he loved: 
 The magic and the beauty of the theme 
 
 55 
 
LXV 
 
 Are lost with us to-day, who whine our plaints, 
 Prayers, orisons, petitions, to the saints 
 
 More than to God, and reverence their bones, 
 And counterfeit their countenance with paints. 
 
 LXVI 
 
 Procul prof anil . . . God is spirit, saith 
 The Book, in spirit worshipt and in faith, 
 
 Not in material guise, but spirit pure: 
 So was He worshipt when the world was rathe. 
 
 LXVII 
 
 Plato, the Stagirite and Socrates, 
 Zeno, Lucretius, Epicurus these 
 
 Darkened not counsel with scholastic wit, 
 And shame us petty moderns to our knees. 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 Those ancient pagan cults, behind the veil 
 Of figure, symbol, allegory, tale 
 
 How pregnant they with beautiful surprise! 
 Ruddy, like sunrise on a fisher s sail. 
 
 LXIX 
 
 For myths are intimations deep and vast 
 (Born of the race s immemorial past, 
 
 Still with the dawn-dreams of creation drenched) 
 That earliest man the thought of God held fast. 
 
 56 
 
LXX 
 
 Wine from those altars old give me to drain; 
 Forget religious tyranny, the stain 
 
 Of bitter creeds and darkened mysteries, 
 And dream the grey earth is renewed again; 
 
 LXXI 
 
 When gods called unto gods in high abodes; 
 Muse answered muse in odes and palinodes. 
 Religion then was life and art and song, 
 And not a thing of creeds and priestly codes. 
 
 LXXII 
 
 How singular and strange the heart of man! 
 Apt both to lag behind or lead the van; 
 
 Hugging false gods . . . and then, Prometheus-like, 
 Snatching the fire from heaven to fan. 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 Sometimes at sunset, gazing at the cloud, 
 Enrapt, I seem to feel that God has bowed 
 
 And come to earth to walk and talk with me, 
 And with a holy flame I seem endowed. 
 
 LXXIV 
 
 That orderly procession of the sky, 
 Marching in serried columns there on high 
 
 Brings me the sense of God pervading all 
 Not in the sacramental mystery. 
 
 57 
 
LXXV 
 
 I can hold glad communion with the stars. 
 In life s fierce turmoil and the world s rude jars 
 
 How good to know that realm inviolate 
 Which no priest enters and no dogma mars. 
 
 LXXVI 
 
 Within his own soul each one finds his creed, 
 Springing responsive to his spirit s need; 
 
 Or golden grain or chaff before the wind, 
 Religion is of man s own heart the seed: 
 
 LXXVII 
 
 Hopes, aspirations, faintings sore, 
 Triumphs, defeats, wild strivings evermore, 
 
 Born of the eager hunger after God 
 In mankind Edenless outside the door. 
 
 LXXVIII 
 
 The Iliad of the Soul were nobler tale 
 Than Troy s far flaming ramparts, or the sail 
 
 That bore Ulysses to the Western Sea. 
 Not like unstable water, they prevail 
 
 LXXIX 
 
 Who bind their hearts to God s own chariot wheel, 
 Who march the planetary road, and steal 
 The alchemy of starlight and of sun 
 On these alone God sets his crimson seal. 
 
 58 
 
LXXX 
 
 "There is no wealth but life." Resolve to be 
 Attuned to its sublime and serious key; 
 
 To wrest from out the dark of here and now 
 The great, the good, the true philosophy. 
 
 LXXXI 
 
 Not length of life, but clean, deep life avails. 
 There is no power whenso the impulse fails. 
 
 Corn grows of God s good bounty, but for bread 
 Thou needs must beat the golden grain with flails. 
 
 LXXXII 
 
 Eternity is long, life short. The while 
 Thou liv st a passing shadow on the dial, 
 Yet worth eternity s whole self to thee. 
 Beware! It may be all thy chance of trial. 
 
 LXXXIII 
 
 True piety is not with measured pace, 
 With outstretched hands and melancholy face 
 
 To kneel before dead altars built with hands, 
 And to the lifted Host thy soul abase. 
 
 LXXXIV 
 
 To contemplate the world with open mind; 
 To do that duty which we nearest find 
 
 Philosophy and creed this is to men 
 By sterile teachings not yet made purblind. 
 
 59 
 
LXXXV 
 
 The poet word by word upbuilds his line; 
 By unseen stages climbs the towering pine; 
 
 With steadfast purpose, painfully and slow, 
 Thou needs must form that character of thine. 
 
 LXXXVI 
 
 "To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield," 
 To clear the sight of those whose eyes are sealed, 
 
 This righteousness alone exalteth man; 
 Not good imputed, of Elysian Field 
 
 LXXXVII 
 
 Dreaming, with hope of recompense therefor, 
 Or paltry fear lest shut may be the door. 
 
 Virtue, how frail it is, when men there be 
 Who traffic even with the Conqueror. 
 
 LXXXVIII 
 
 Death is the ultimate keen edge of things; 
 Death is the highway of the King of Kings. 
 
 He weeps who walks along that road with dread; 
 He who that highway walks intrepid, sings. 
 
 LXXXIX 
 
 And was it not to set forth this high claim 
 That saint and martyr, poet, prophet came? 
 
 Some to be crowned with laurel wreath, and some 
 To sanctify their message in the flame. 
 
 60 
 
xc 
 
 When roars the lion, who may lie asleep? 
 
 Not the awed shepherd crouched among his sheep. 
 
 Whether in still small voice or trumpet blast, 
 When God hath spoken who dare silence keep? 
 
 XCI 
 
 High poetry, high art, high truth, high God, 
 Are reached by paths the crowd has never trod, 
 
 That ignorantly gropes and stumbles on, 
 To all high aspiration but a clod. 
 
 XCII 
 
 As far as knowledge and clear reason show, 
 By their austere direction I will go; 
 
 And when, at utmost edge of thought they fail, 
 Like Hugo of St. Victor, in the glow 
 
 XCIII 
 
 Of far-off vision and of dim surmise, 
 To inner voices listing of surprise, 
 
 I still will climb, till o er some summit far 
 The rose of God s own wondrous dawn shall rise. 
 
 61 
 
They are conquered, they break, they are stricken, 
 Whose magic made the whole world pale; 
 
 They are dust that shall rise not nor quicken, 
 Though the world for their death s sake wail. 
 
 SWINBURNE, The Last Oracle [A.D. 361]. 
 
 Schone Welt, wo bist Du? Kehre wieder 
 
 Holdes Bliithenalter der Natur. 
 Ach, nur in dem Feenland der Lieder 
 
 Lebt noch deine fabelhafte Spur. 
 Ausgestorben trauert das Gefilde, 
 
 Keine Gottheit zeigt sich meinem Blick; 
 Ach, von jenem lebenswarmen Bilde 
 
 Blieb der Schatten nur zuriick. 
 
 GOETHE. 
 
 63 
 
NOTES 
 
 STANZA II. 
 
 Pagina claudere, jamque retexere desine multa. 
 Claudere pagina, denique carmina nostra, audite. 
 Cf. Marcus Aurelius I, 16: "Farewell, my books." 
 We find the same thought as to the futility of mere 
 erudition in Omar Khayyam, . 
 
 Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and saint, and heard great argument 
 
 About it and about: but evermore 
 Came out by the same door as in I went. 
 "Blind leaders of the blind" comes from Matt. xv. 14. 
 
 STANZA IIL 
 
 Cf. Isaiah xxix. 11; Daniel viii. 26 ; Habakkukii.2. 
 
 STANZA v. 
 
 Mutat enim mundi naturam totius aetas 
 Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet, 
 Nee manet ulla sui similis res. Omnia migrant. 
 Nihil constat, quoniam minui rem quamque videmus, 
 Et quasi longinquo fluere omnia cernimus aevo. 
 For time changes the nature of the whole world, 
 and one condition of things after another must suc 
 ceed all things, nor does anything abide like itself. 
 We see all things change. Nothing lasts. We per 
 ceive that everything ebbs, as it were, by reason of 
 years. 
 
 This closely reflects the thought of Marcus Aurelius: 
 The time of a man s life is as a point, the substance 
 of it ever flowing to be brief, as a dream or as 
 smoke, so are all that belong to the soul. The time, 
 therefore, that any man doth live is but a little, and 
 the place where he liveth is but a very little corner 
 of the earth; and the greatest fame that can remain 
 of a man after his death, even that is but a little. 
 Casaubon s translation. 
 
 65 
 
STANZA VI. 
 
 Inrevocabilis abstulerit jam praeterita a;tas, 
 Denique ab ignibus ad gelidas iter usque pruinas 
 Finitum est, retroque pari ratione remensum est; 
 Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, 
 Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum, 
 Et quasi cursores vits lampada primordia posse. 
 Denique non monimenta virum dilapsa videmus 
 Quaerere proporro sibi sene senescere credas? 
 
 Time now gone by has irrevocably passed. From 
 summer fires to chill frost a definite path is traced 
 out, and in like manner is again traveled back. Some 
 nations wax, others wane, and in a brief space things 
 are changed and, like runners, hand over the lamp of 
 life. See we not the monuments of men, fallen to 
 ruin, ask whether you would believe that they could 
 decay with years? 
 
 STANZA VII. 
 
 Was the poet thinking of the striking verse in Isaiah 
 xiv. 18?: "All the kings of the nations, all of them, 
 sleep in glory, every one in his own house." 
 
 Or Job iii. 14: "... at rest with kings and coun 
 cillors of the earth, who built for themselves pyra 
 mids." 
 
 There seems also to be some reflection of Vergil: 
 Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram 
 Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna. 
 
 JEneid VI. 268. 
 
 Along the illimitable shade 
 Darkling and lone their way they made, 
 Through the vast kingdom of the dead, 
 An empty void, though tenanted. 
 
 Conington s translation. 
 
 STANZA VIII. 
 
 It is curious to see how a French poet of the seven 
 teenth century, Pierre Le Moyne, in his now forgotten 
 poem on Saint Louis in Egypt [1653], has visualized 
 the heart of the pyramids in much the same way. 
 
 66 
 
Sous les pieds de ces monts tallies et suspendus, 
 II s etend des pays tenebreux et perdus, 
 Des deserts spacieux, des solitudes sombres, 
 Faites pour le sejour des morts et de leurs ombres. 
 La sont les corps des rois et les corps des sultans 
 Diversement ranges selon 1 ordre des temps, 
 Les uns sont enchasses dans decreuses images 
 A qui 1 art a donne leur taille et leurs visages; 
 Et dans ces vieux portraits, qui sont leurs monu 
 ments, 
 Leur orgueil se conserve avec leur ossements. 
 
 STANZAS IX-XII. 
 
 These identical reflections, couched even in much 
 the same language, showing that there is no new 
 thought under the sun, occurred to Sir Thomas 
 Browne, the immortal author of the essay on "Urn- 
 Burial." 
 
 " What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles 
 assumed when he hid himself among the women, 
 though puzzling questions, are not beyond all con 
 jecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries 
 entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept 
 with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide 
 solution. But who were the proprietaries of these 
 bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a 
 question above antiquarianism. . . . The iniquity of 
 oblivion scattereth her poppy, and deals with the 
 memory of man without distinction to merit of per 
 petuity . . . Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian s 
 horse, confounded that of himself. . . . Who knows 
 whether the best of men be known, or whether there 
 be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that 
 be remembered in the known account of time?" 
 
 Compare Sir Leslie Stephen s noble brief for the 
 forgotten great in his essay on "Forgotten Benefac 
 tors," especially the last paragraph. 
 
 "They will be forgotten before long as we too shall 
 be forgotten the incalculable majority within a gen 
 eration or two. The thought may be painful, but the 
 reasonable conclusion is, I think, not that we should 
 fret over the inevitable; rather that we should purify 
 
 67 
 
our minds from this as from other illusions, and feel 
 ashamed of the selfish desire that our own names 
 should be preserved when we know that so many 
 who were far better and nobler than ourselves will 
 be inevitably forgotten, and were better and nobler 
 without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. . . . 
 Though the memory may be transitory, the good done 
 by a noble life and character may last far beyond 
 any horizon which can be realized by our imagina 
 tions." 
 
 STANZA XIV. 
 
 The suggestion of the Meditations of Marcus Aurel- 
 ius is positive in these lines of the original. But the 
 Roman emperor makes the trio to be composed of 
 Alexander, Pompey, and Caesar: 
 
 "Alexander, Pompeius, Caesar, cum tot urbes fun- 
 ditus evertissent tot hominum myriades in prcelio 
 cecidissent, ipsi quoque tandem vita excesserunt." 
 III. 3. [I have quoted an old seventeenth century 
 Latin translation as it brings out the identity between 
 the two more strikingly.] 
 
 The lines of the poem are worth quoting here, for 
 they are not unimpressive: 
 
 . . . prole Phillip! 
 
 Non eris altior, at meritus minor hoc quoque scribi 
 Ludere, proelia, cunctaque mcenia sponte patere. 
 Orbis et extima vidit, et ultima, vir fore natus, 
 Gentibus, urbibus et dominantibus est dominatus. 
 Illeque Cyrus? Fama relinquitur. Caesar obisti. 
 
 Thou shalt not be higher than the son of Philip, 
 but fhall be written less of achievement than he. He 
 saw the farthest and uttermost ends of the earth, born 
 to be a man, and ruled over nations and cities and 
 kings. And thou, Cyrus? Where art thou? Fame 
 has abandoned thee. And Caesar? Thou, too, art 
 dead. 
 
 STANZA XV. 
 
 This stanza seems to be a reflection from the Book 
 of Ecclesiasticus xli. 3, 4, by Joshua Ben-Sirach: 
 
 68 
 
" Be not affrighted at death thy lot; remember them 
 that have been before thee and that came after. This 
 is the lot of all flesh from the Lord. Wherefore dost 
 thou push from thee the ordinance of the Most High? 
 Be it a thousand years, or a hundred, or ten, there is 
 no grievance concerning life among the dead." 
 
 Compare Matthew Arnold s fine lines: 
 Yes, as the son of Thetis said, 
 
 I hear thee saying now: 
 "Greater by far than thee are dead, 
 
 Strive not. Die also thou!" 
 
 STANZA XVII. 
 
 Persius has put this thought with a pithiness which 
 is the despair of the translator, and of course minus 
 the biblical allusion: 
 
 Curn lux altera venit 
 
 Jam eras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud eras 
 Egerit hos annos, et semper paulum erit ultra. 
 
 Satires V. 67. 
 
 When dawns another day 
 Reflect that yesterday s to-morrow s o er, 
 Thus one to-morrow, one to-morrow more, 
 Have seen long years before them fade away 
 And still appear no nearer than to-day. 
 
 Gifford s translation. 
 
 Compare: Les annees paraissent longues quand 
 elles sont encore loin de nous; arrivees, elles dis- 
 paraiseent; elles nous echappent en un instant. 
 Massillon, Fragment du sermon sur la mart, la 
 brievete de la vie, one of the finest monuments of 
 pulpit eloquence in literature. 
 
 STANZA XVIII. 
 
 Purpura transiit escaque finiit, ultio restat. 
 
 Rege coro sata vermibus est data, factaque vermis. 
 
 At claros homines voluerunt se atque potentes, 
 
 Ut fundamento stabili fortuna maneret 
 
 Et palcidam possent opulenti degere vitam, 
 
 Nequiquam quoniam ad summum succedere honorem, 
 
 69 
 
Certantes iter infestum fecere viae, 
 Et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos 
 Invidia interdum contemptim in Tartara taetra; 
 Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum 
 Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere. 
 Ergo regibus occisis subversa jacebit 
 Pristina majestas soliorum et sceptra superba, 
 Et capitis summi praeclarum insigne cruentum, 
 Sub pedibus vulgi magnum lugebit honorem. 
 Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet, 
 Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce 
 JEquo animo. 
 
 Purple passes and eating comes to an end, but 
 vengeance endures. The flesh that sprang from kings 
 is given to worms is become worms. Men have 
 wished to be famous and powerful in order that their 
 fortunes might rest on a firm foundation, and that 
 they might by their wealth be able to lead a tranquil 
 life; but in vain, since in their struggle to mount up 
 to the highest dignities they rendered their path one 
 full of danger; and even if they reach it, yet envy, 
 like a thunderbolt, sometimes strikes and dashes men 
 down from the highest point with ignominy into 
 noisome Tartarus; so that far better is it to obey in 
 peace and quiet than to wish to rule with supreme 
 power and be the master of kingdoms. For kings 
 shall be slain and the ancient majesty of thrones and 
 proud sceptres shall be overthrown and laid in the 
 dust, and the glorious badge of the sovereign head 
 bloodstained beneath the feet of the rabble, shall 
 mourn for its high prerogative. Were a man to order 
 his life by the rule of true reason, a frugal substance 
 joined to a contented mind is for him great riches. 
 
 STANZA XIX. 
 
 With mediaeval fondness for redundancy the poet 
 turns this thought and figure over and over, which I 
 have omitted to do in the stanza. 
 
 Terrea gloria nunc quasi lilia, eras quasi ventus. 
 
 Quid rogo carnea gloria? Quid rosa? Foenum. 
 
 Stat rosa pristina nomine nuda tenemus. 
 
 Flos erat, est fimus ille potissimus illeque fortis; 
 
 70 
 
Vix ibi sportula plena, vel urnula quo prius orbis 
 Mane stat aggere, nee mora vespere fertur humatus. 
 Qui modo flos fuit, in spatio ruit unius horae; 
 Mox rapitur, licet ingenio micet atque decore. 
 
 [Notice that these two lines are "leonine hexa 
 meters," i.e. hexameters containing rhymes or asson 
 ances. For an account of the technique of this form 
 of mediaeval verse see Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, 
 vol. II, pp. 199-200.] 
 
 Laus stat imaginis, umbraque nominis, immo nee 
 
 umbra. 
 
 Proinde licet quot vis vivendo condere saecla; 
 Mors aeterna tamen nilo minus, ilia manebit, 
 Nee minus ille diu jam non erit, ex hodierno 
 Lumine qui finem vitae fecit, et ille, 
 Mensibus atque annis qui multis occidit ante. 
 Jure igitur pereunt, succumbunt omnia plagis 
 Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi 
 Expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas. 
 Ergo rerum inter summam minimamque quid escit? 
 
 Earthly glory, like lilies now, to-morrow is as the 
 wind. What is the glory of the flesh? I ask. Tis 
 earth. Its roses? Grass. The rose of yore exists in 
 name only ; mere names we wear. He was a flower and 
 now is slime, that powerful, that brave one. Scarcely 
 would he fill a basket or a little urn who before filled 
 the world. In the morning he stands upon the earth; 
 in the evening he is carried out for burial. That which 
 was but now a blooming flower falls in the space of 
 an hour, and is shortly snatched away, though it flash 
 with the beauty of body and soul. The glory of a 
 statue remains and the shadow of a name. Nay, not 
 even a shadow. You may complete as many genera 
 tions as you please during your life: none the less, 
 however, will everlasting death await you; and for 
 no less a long time will he be no more in being who, 
 beginning with to-day, has ended his life, than the 
 man who died many months and many years ago. 
 With reason all things perish. So shall the walls of 
 the great world around be stormed and fall to decay 
 and crumbling ruins. Therefore between the sum of 
 things and the least of things what difference? 
 
 71 
 
Ausonius, the best of post-classical Latin poets, 
 sums up in one line a thought which the mediaeval 
 ecclesiastic could not help being turgid about: 
 Una dies aperit, conficit una dies 
 
 Idyl xv. 
 
 Malherbe, in the beautiful lines of consolation 
 which he wrote to his friend Du Perrier, who had 
 lost a little daughter, exquisitely uses this figure of 
 the rose born to perish so soon. 
 
 Mais elle etait du monde, ou les plus belles choses 
 
 Ont le pire destin, 
 Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses 
 
 L espace d un matin. 
 
 STANZAS XXII-III. 
 
 The thought embodied in stanzas xxii-xxiii is clear 
 evidence of the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, 
 as it was metamorphosed through the alembic of the 
 medieval especially the Arabic mind. The schol 
 astics of the early Middle Ages only knew Aristotle 
 as a logician. But in the thirteenth century the 
 Physics and the Metaphysics became well known, 
 principally through Toledo translations from Arabic 
 into Latin of the abridgements of Avicenna and the 
 commentaries of Averroes. Europe by that time had 
 a complete and systematically developed philosophy. 
 But Averroistic Aristotelianism was at odds with the 
 traditional teachings of the church. It taught that 
 God knew universals, but not particulars; whence it 
 was argued that God had no foreknowledge and was 
 not a providence. Accordingly, if there was no provi 
 dence governing the world, everything must happen 
 by hazard or destiny, unless some other supernal in 
 fluence could be adduced. Since the intelligent mind 
 rejects the idea that events happen from mere chance, 
 and Mohammedan Aristotelianism was opposed to 
 the eastern doctrine of fatalism (or destiny), the 
 Arabs concluded that everything was determined by 
 the movement of the stars and therefore by the 
 intelligence which ordered them. In such a teaching, 
 obviously, there was no room for the church s chas 
 tisement of the damned or for the celestial glory of 
 
 72 
 
the saved. The argument was carried further: Since 
 God does not know the world except in universals and 
 not particulars, how could He have created it? Mani 
 festly it is idle to think that the world was created 
 from all eternity and to all eternity. And if not the 
 world, how can the creatures of earth claim immor 
 tality? Averroistic Aristotelianism made a profound 
 impression. Many thinkers accepted it with all its 
 implied consequences. There were clerks at Paris 
 who denied the existence of God, the eternality of the 
 universe and the very immortality of the soul. Such 
 were Boethius of Dacia, Siger of Brabant, and Bernard 
 of Nivelles, whose teachings we will find again farther 
 on. Compare what has been said in the introduction. 
 
 STANZA XXVI. 
 
 The same thought is to be found in John of Salis 
 bury, Polycrat. VI. 12, from whom it most certainly 
 was borrowed: 
 
 "In qua laborans mundus jam senuit, in qua plus 
 temporis consumptum est quam in acquirendo et 
 regendo orbis consumpserit Caesarea domus." 
 
 STANZA XXVII. 
 
 This is an echo of the piercing inquiry of St. Aug 
 ustine in his Confessions, bk. I, ch. 6, sec. 9: Die 
 mihi, Deus, utrum jam alicui aetati meae mortuae 
 successerit infantia mea: an ilia est quam egi intra 
 viscere matris meae? Nam et de ilia est mihi nonni- 
 hil indicatum est, et praegnantes ipse vidi feminas. 
 Quid ante hanc etiam, dulcedo mea, Deus meus? 
 Fuine alicubi? aut aliquis? Nam quis mihi dicatista 
 non habeo; nee pater, nee mater, potuerunt, nee 
 aliorum experimentum, nee memoria. 
 
 STANZAS XXVII-IX. 
 
 The figure is of a potter s wheel as the symbol of 
 fortune, and the uncertain fashioning of human life. 
 There is a wonderful description of a potter at his 
 task in Ecclesiasticus, "whose manner of working is 
 described in terms which make us regret that the 
 Hebrew original of this passage is not among the 
 
 73- 
 
recovered fragments." Bevan, Jerusalem under the 
 high priests, p. 67. Marcus Aurelius says: "The 
 wheel of the world has ever the same motion, upward 
 and downward, from generation to generation." 
 Omar Khayyam s use of the metaphor will occur to all. 
 Cf. Romans xi. 21. 
 
 STANZA XXX. 
 
 E mare primum homines possent oriri. 
 
 "Anaximander, who lived after 600 B.C., held that 
 man was descended from a fish, and that animals only 
 developed legs and other organs after the waters 
 which originally covered the earth had dried up." 
 
 Masson, Lucretius, epicurean and poet, p. 172 note. 
 
 The scientific inquiry of the ancient Greeks far 
 exceeded what is usually thought. Epicurus antici 
 pated the "nerve-storm" of the modern physiologist. 
 Masson, loc. cit., p. 347. Atmospheric pressure and 
 the conservation of energy were also divined, if not 
 understood. "The Darwinian doctrines of evolution, 
 both the struggle for existence and the survival of 
 the fittest, are closely foreshadowed by him [Lucre 
 tius, De rerum natura}. The vexed questions of our 
 day as to man s origin and destiny look us in the 
 face again in his poem. . . . Science has now 
 proved that his propositions as to the constitution of 
 matter, in each case, are either certainly true, or else 
 foreshadow the truth. Indeed, its agreement with the 
 results of modern science makes us wonder how the 
 ancient students of nature, who had no means of veri 
 fying the observations of the senses through experi 
 ment, could have succeeded as they did. Like men 
 walking abroad at night without a lantern, they could 
 take with them no test of experimental inquiry by 
 which to verify their hypothesis; but in spite of all, 
 some faculty enabled them to keep the right path. 
 ... It was Gassendi who rescued Epicurus atomic 
 theory from the forgotten science of the old world 
 and revived it as the truest basis for a scientific study 
 of nature. Through Gassendi and his influence both 
 on Newton and on Boyle, as well as on many other 
 minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 Epicurus theory has taken firm root in modern 
 
 74 
 
science, and has developed, by stage after stage, into 
 that atomic theory of modern chemistry and, in our 
 own day in particular, in molecular physics. . . . 
 What would Lucretius have said to the spectrum 
 analysis by which the chemist can literally pass be 
 yond the flaming ramparts of the world, and bring 
 us tidings from the distant stars?" Masson, loc. cit., 
 pp. 76, 81, 83 note. Cf. Tyrrell, Latin Poetry, pp. 
 85-88. 
 
 For the detrimental effect of the church upon Greek 
 scientific thought see Hatch, Influence of Greek ideas 
 and usages upon the Christian church [Hibbert Lec 
 tures], 1890, p. 26 f. 
 
 STANZAS XXXI-II. 
 
 The thought in these lines was probably less sug 
 gested by Genesis i. 2: "And the spirit of God moved 
 upon the face of the waters," than by Vergil s Georgics 
 IV. 221: 
 
 Deum namque ire per omnes 
 
 Terrasque tractusque maris, coelumque profundum. 
 
 Through every land God journeys, and across 
 
 The ocean wastes and through the depths of heaven. 
 
 The psychology embodied here, though written six 
 hundred years ago, agrees with the findings of modern 
 psychological research. "Our normal waking con 
 sciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but 
 one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, 
 parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie 
 potential gorms of consciousness entirely different, 
 ... No account of the universe in its totality can 
 be final which leaves these other forms of conscious 
 ness quite disregarded. Yet they may determine 
 attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and 
 open a region though they fail to give a map." James, 
 The varieties of religious experience, p. 388. 
 
 And Benson ?n his Life of Fitzgerald, p. 186, writes : 
 "The most precise and definite religious systems, 
 after all, can only profess to touch the fringe of the 
 deep and perennial mysteries of life. They seem to 
 brighten only the crescent edge of the shadowy orb, 
 and leave the dark tracts unrevealed. The mystery 
 
 75 
 
of pain, of evil, of the future life, of the brevity of 
 existence, these can not be solved. The utmost that 
 religion can do is to illuminate a few yards of the 
 glimmering pathway." 
 
 STANZAS XXXIIMV. 
 
 Sed nil dulcius est bene quam munita tenere 
 Edita doctrina sapientium templa serena; 
 Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre 
 Errare, atque viam palantes quaerere vitae. 
 Quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae 
 Proficiunt neque nobilitas neque gloria regni, 
 Quod superest animo quoque nil prodesse putandum. 
 But nothing is sweeter than to occupy the well- 
 defended serene heights of the wise, built high with 
 learning, from which you may be able to look down 
 on others, and see them wandering and straying in all 
 directions in search of the path of life. Wherefore 
 since neither treasures, nor nobility, nor the glory of 
 a kingdom are of any profit to the body, we must also 
 deem that they are of no profit to the soul. 
 
 STANZA XXXV. 
 
 This was a popular legend in the Middle Ages and 
 is alluded to by Dante, Purgatorio, canto X. 
 
 STANZAS XXXVI-VII. 
 
 Again I have abridged. 
 Cur etiam nunc est mortalibus horror, 
 Qui delubra Dei nova toto suscitat orbi? 
 Terrarum et festis cogit celebrare diebus? 
 Profanum. Si certain finem esse viderent 
 jZErumnarum homines, aliqua ratione valerent 
 Episcoporum minis obsistere vero. 
 Nunc ratio nulla est restandi, nulla facultas, 
 j^Eternas quoniam pcenas in morte timendum. 
 Sed metus in vita poenarum, mens conscia factis, 
 Nee videt interea qui terminus esse malorum 
 Possit nee quae sit poenarum denique finis 
 Atque eadem metuit magis haec ne in morte 
 
 gravescant. 
 Inde metus maculat pcenarum praemia vitae. 
 
 76 
 
What is the cause of that shuddering awe implanted 
 in the human heart, which at this very time is raising 
 up new churches to God over the whole world, and 
 impels men to throng them on holy days? How im 
 moral! If men saw that there was a fixed limit to 
 the things which beset them they would be able in 
 some way to defy the threatenings of the bishops. 
 As it is, there is no way, no means of resisting, since 
 they all fear everlasting pains after death. The con 
 science-stricken mind sees not what end there can be 
 of ills, or what limit at last there may be to punish 
 ments, and fears lest these very evils will be enhanced 
 after death. 
 
 STANZA XXXVIII. 
 
 Mortalitatis 
 
 Obsurduerunt aures completae stridore catena. 
 [A magnificent line borrowed literally from Augus 
 tine s Confessions, bk. II, ch. 2, sec. 1.] 
 Prsesulis infula, solvere vincula, vincla tenere, 
 Canone respuit, aereque destruit, astruit acre. 
 Gratia vendita, gratia tradita vi feritatis; 
 Gratia, gratia, quam parit ternaque marca 
 Quae tamen emptio, sacra redemptio fertur earum. 
 
 Men have become deaf with mortality s loud-clank 
 ing chain. The chasubled bishop refuses to loose 
 bonds and holds bonds tight, according to the canon 
 law, and destroys or builds up for gold. Grace is 
 sold, grace is bestowed through force and fraud. 
 Grace, grace, which is got for a paltry sum of money. 
 Yet this purchase is called their holy redemption. 
 
 "The Stoics and the Platonists refused to admit 
 that self-completion could be attained through the 
 sacrifice of another, a view, of course, implicit in the 
 church s doctrine of atonement. Plato waxed indig 
 nant over the moral effect of believing that the unjust 
 man can, while retaining all the gains of his injustice, 
 square the gods and circumvent them by some im 
 posing sort of ritual." Masson, op. cit., p. 26. 
 
 Canon Bigg, The church s task under the Roman 
 Empire, pref., p. xiv, has said: "They [Stoics and 
 Platonists] would not admit that the undeserved, vol- 
 
 77 
 
untary suffering of one could make another better. 
 Plotinus expressly rejects the idea as immoral. . . . 
 It seemed to him inconceivable that it should be the 
 duty of a good man to give up any portion of his 
 spiritual wealth for the relief of the poor, to make 
 himself worse that others might be better." 
 
 Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor, in his history of The 
 Mediaeval Mind, vol. II, p. 296, admirably contrasts 
 the ancient and the mediaeval Christian thought: 
 
 "While neither Plato s inquiry for truth nor Aris 
 totle s catholic search for knowledge was isolated 
 from its bearing on either the conduct or the event 
 of life, nevertheless with them rational inquiry was 
 a final motive, representing in itself that which was 
 most divinely human, and so the best for man. But 
 with the philosophers of the Middle Ages it never 
 was quite so. For the need of salvation had worked 
 in men s blood for generations. And salvation, man s 
 highest good, did not consist in humanly-attained 
 knowledge or in virtue won by human strength; but 
 was divinely mediated, and had to be accepted upon 
 authority." 
 
 STANZA XXXIX. 
 
 Perque tot aetates hominum, tot tempora et annos, 
 
 Cum fortuna lucem quaerat, vix invenit usquam. 
 
 Nam etiam tenebris immersum Tartaron atra 
 
 In lucem de nocte vocant. 
 
 Through all the periods of man s life, all genera 
 tions, all years, although man seeks ever for light, 
 scarce ever does he find it. For there are those who 
 summon Hell itself into daylight out of black night 
 and the gulf of shadows. 
 
 STANZA XL. 
 
 Omnis cum in tenebris prassertim vita laboret; 
 
 Quamvis ridicula haec ludibraque esse videmus. 
 
 Multi similes nautis projectis ab undis. 
 
 For all life is a struggle in the dark to some, al 
 though we see that these things are food for laughter 
 and mere mockeries. Many are like sailors cast up 
 by the waves. 
 
 78 
 
STANZA XLV. 
 
 Humana ante oculos foede nunc jam jacet 
 
 In terris oppressa gravi sub religione. 
 
 For human life lies shamefully grovelling before 
 
 our eyes, bowed to the dust beneath the heavy weight 
 
 of superstition. 
 
 STANZA XLVI. 
 
 The poet, like Lucretius, "feels that he has escaped 
 from superstition as from some gloomy low-vaulted 
 prison. He has cut his way through the phalanx of 
 his priestly jailers, and now is in the open." Masson, 
 op. cit., p. 410. 
 
 I find these sentences in a recent article by Mr. 
 Bertrand Russell: "It is escape from prison that 
 gives to some moments and to some thoughts a quality 
 of infinity, like light breaking through from some 
 greater world beyond. Sudden beauty in the midst 
 of strife, uncalculating love, or the night-wind in the 
 trees, seem to suggest the possibility of a life free 
 from the conflicts and pettinesses of our every-day 
 world, a life where there is peace which no misfortune 
 can disturb." Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1912, p. 48. 
 
 One might use the very words of Goethe in this 
 connection : 
 
 Away from the darkened rooms, 
 
 Where they grudge you the light of day; 
 Where men low-bowing in craven fear 
 
 To their mis-shapen idols pray. 
 Of superstitious worshipers 
 
 Enough in the years of old. To-day 
 Have done with portent, myth and ghost 
 Leave them all to your teachers gray. 
 
 [Gesetz der Triibe, in Gott and Wdt.~\ 
 
 STANZA XLVII. 
 
 Mutat enim mundi naturam totius aetas 
 Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet, 
 Nel manet ulla sui similis res. Omnia migrant. 
 Aurea tempora primaque robora, redde, rogamus. 
 
 79 
 
For time changes the face of the whole world, and 
 one condition of things after another necessarily fol 
 lows in all things. All things move and suffer change. 
 Give back those golden times, we ask, and that pris 
 tine strength. 
 
 STANZA XLVIII. 
 
 Compare curribus, aequor arantibus arida velis, 
 Ruraque piscibus, aera navibus, astra camelis, 
 Candida de nigris, et de candentibus atra, 
 Quadrata rotundis mutata. 
 
 Perhaps these lines were influenced by Lucretius, 
 III. 784-86: 
 
 Denique in aethere non arbor, non aequore in alto 
 Nubes esse queunt nee pisces vivere in arvis 
 Nee cruor in lignis neque saxis inesse. 
 
 STANZA L. 
 
 Sed sua pascua non nisi menstrua sunt animarum, 
 Solaque funera solaque munera primitiarum: 
 Quid mora? pascitut, est quia dicitur, est sibi pastor. 
 His fodder is nothing but the purification of souls 
 and the celebration of first fruits. Enough he 
 feeds, he is, because so called is to himself, a 
 pastor. 
 
 STANZA LIV. 
 
 An allusion to the historic claim of St. John Lateran 
 to be "omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et 
 caput " the mother and head of the churches of the 
 city [Rome] and of the world. 
 
 STANZAS LV-LVII. 
 
 I confess to have dealt very freely in the transla 
 tion with the original, which is a long and turgid 
 invective : 
 
 Haec neque nomine digna, nee ordine ecclesia stat; 
 
 Haec vitis perit, haec animas gerit irrequietas. 
 
 Haec bona perdidit; haec genus edidit ore dolosum, 
 
 Pectore mobile, re variabile, menta probosum. 
 
 80 
 
Recta perhorruit, ordine corruit, eminet astu. 
 Sollicitudine, fraude, libidine, crimine fastu. 
 Est sine nomine, nam sine numine, nam sine jure; 
 Perdida cladibus est, quia fraudibus, hae sibi curag. 
 Pontificum status ante fuit ratus integer ante; 
 Ille statum dabat, ordine nunc labataille labante. 
 Gratia corruit, algor in horruit amplior Istro. 
 Pontificum status excidio datus, exstat avarus; 
 Sternite, sternite, gutture sospite, pseudomagistri ! 
 
 O mala secula, venditur infula pontificalis; 
 Infula venditur, haud reprehenditur emptio talis. 
 Venditur annulus, hinc lucra Romulus auget et urget ; 
 Est modo mortua Roma superflua; quando resurget? 
 Roma superfluit, afflua corruit arida plena; 
 Roma dat omnibus omnia dantibus, omnia Romae; 
 Transita vocula longaque f abula persequitur te. 
 Roma ruens rota, foeda, satis notat cauteriat te; 
 Gurges es altior, area voracior, alta lacuna. 
 Fas mihi scribere, fas mihi dicere Roma peristi. 
 Fas mihi dicere, fas mihi scribere Roma fuisti. 
 Fas mihi dicere, fas mihi scribere Roma ruisti. 
 
 The church is neither worthy of a name nor erect 
 in its place. It is perishing from vice and displays a 
 restless spirit. It has destroyed its blessings and 
 brought forth a brood crafty of speech, fickle of 
 heart, uncertain in affairs, vicious of mind. It 
 shudders at the right, is careless of order, distin 
 guished by guile, soliciting, deceit, lust, arrogance, 
 and guilt. It is without a name being without God 
 and without justice. It is destroyed by disasters be 
 cause of frauds these are its care. Lo, a race 
 vicious of speech, impious in character! The place 
 of the pope once was a tower of strength, firm and 
 inviolable. Now it totters as things totter around it. 
 Grace is dead and a cold broods over us wider than 
 the Danube. The high place of the popes is given 
 over to destruction ; they have become misers. Spread, 
 spread destruction abroad, while your necks are yet 
 safe, ye false teachers. 
 
 evil age, the chasuble of the pontiff is sold, the 
 chasuble is sold and this commerce goes unrebuked. 
 The ring is sold and hence Romulus increases his 
 
 81 
 
gains. Overflowing Rome is dead now. When will 
 she rise again? Rome overflowed and collapsed in 
 her affluence, withering in her fulness. Rome gives 
 all things to all who give all things to Rome. 
 
 A voice that is gone and a distant tale pursue thee. 
 Rome, thou art a wobbling wheel, a foul enough 
 
 mark brands thee, 
 Thou art a deep whirlpool, a devouring receptacle, 
 
 a deep pool. 
 
 Tis right for me to write, to say/Thou hast perished. 
 T is right for me to say, to write, Thou wast. 
 T is right for me to say, to write, Thou art fallen. 
 
 STANZA LVIII. 
 
 This interesting stanza, enunciating the doctrine 
 of "eternal recurrence" so familiar to readers of 
 Nietzsche, admirably serves to fix the time of the 
 poet. For the doctrine of eternal recurrence was a 
 striking teaching of Siger of Brabant and his school 
 of Averroistic Aristotelians. Siger had a vision of 
 Time truly poetical. He believed in cyclic evolu 
 tion that is to say, he believed that the ideas of an 
 epoch, the laws, civilization, religions, would return 
 again to the point of departure. But as the series of 
 variations which formed a cycle were infinitely long, 
 men were unable to perceive the transitions or even 
 to retain the memory of the changes. Nevertheless, 
 he held that these great aeons succeeded one another, 
 the long series of evolutions and transitions ultimate 
 ly getting around in a circle to the beginning again. 
 See Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, p. 171. 
 
 STANZA LXII. 
 
 . . . antiquo more sacrorum 
 Ecclesia munificat mortalis muta salute, 
 Quae bene et eximiae quamvis disposita ferantur, 
 Longe sunt tamen a vera ratione repulsa. 
 Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque, 
 Inversis quas sub verbis latitantia cernunt, 
 Veraque constituunt quae belle tangere possunt 
 Auris et lepido quae sunt fucata sonore. 
 
 82 
 
After immemorial ritual the Church, with inexpres 
 sible blessing, sifts down her grace upon mortals. All 
 which things, well and beautifully as they are mani 
 fested, yet are widely removed from true reason. For 
 fools admire and like all the more things which they 
 perceive to be concealed under involved language, 
 and think things to be true which are glossed over 
 with finely sounding phrases, the sonorous rhythm of 
 which pleases the ear. Cf. Lucretius II. 606-28, de 
 scription of the gorgeous processional and mysteries 
 of the worship of Magna Mater. 
 
 The principle of the aesthetic function in worship, 
 so sharply condemned in these lines, is eloquently 
 set forth by James, The varieties of religious experi 
 ence, pp. 458-60: 
 
 "It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted 
 and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a 
 church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles 
 and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an 
 atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are 
 like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may 
 sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. 
 . . . Although some persons aim most at intellectual 
 purity and simplification, for others richness is the 
 supreme imaginative requirement." 
 
 Ruskin, Stones of Venice [St. Mark s, sec. xx], 
 enumerates the rich "assemblage of those sources of 
 influence which address themselves to the commonest 
 instincts of the human mind : . . . darkness and mys 
 tery, confused recesses of buildings, artificial light 
 employed in small quantity, but maintained with a 
 constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness, 
 preciousness of material easily comprehended by the 
 vulgar eye, close air loaded with a sweet and peculiar 
 odour associated only with religious services, solemn 
 music and tangible idols or images having popular 
 legends attached to them." 
 
 STANZA LXIII. 
 
 I have borrowed this last line from Matthew 
 Arnold s famous sonnet, for it quite exactly translates 
 the Latin: 
 
 Sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri. 
 83 
 
STANZA LXV. 
 
 Nec vero superstitione tollenda religio tollitur, 
 wrote Cicero, De divinatione, II. 72, 148. "True 
 religion is raised by the destruction of superstition." 
 The materialism, the grossness, the bigotry, the igno 
 rance in a word, the superstition which pervaded 
 mediaeval faith found one of its strongest manifesta 
 tions in the veneration of relics. The Iconoclastic 
 Controversy in the eighth century was a revolt against 
 the abuses of the practice. The more intelligent and 
 the deeper spiritual natures of the Middle Age pro 
 tested in vain against the worship of relics. Guibert 
 de Nogent, born 1053, in the diocese of Beauvais, 
 wrote a famous treatise, De pignoribus sanctorum, 
 which he dedicated to Eudes, abbot of St. Symphorian 
 de Beauvais. See Le Franc, Le traite des reliques 
 de Guibert de Nogent, in Etudes du moyen-age dediees 
 a Gabriel Monod, pp. 285-306. Possibly this cry of 
 outraged intelligence of more than a century before 
 him was known to the poet. 
 
 STANZA LXVI. 
 
 Aurea tempora primaque robora praeterierunt ; 
 Aurea gens fuit, et simul haec ruit, ilia ruerunt. 
 Pristina saecula non nisi regula nota regabat; 
 Saecula pristina non nisi pagina viva docebat. 
 Qua? modo marmore qualibet arbore templa 
 struebant; 
 Quae sculptibus atria cultibus expoliebant. 
 
 The golden age and its primeval strength have 
 gone. Golden the race was, and when it fell they 
 fell. The primitive age governed only by rules that 
 were known. The primitive age taught only from the 
 living page. The temples now built of marble they 
 built of any tree; the halls now adorned with sculp 
 ture they adorned with devotion. 
 
 STANZA LXVII. 
 
 The lines of the original here seem to be an ampli 
 fication of Horace s line in the Ars Poetica [line 3091 : 
 Rem tibi Socraticae poterunt ostendere chartae, 
 
 84 
 
and possibly reminiscent of Cicero s "errare meher- 
 cule malo cum Platone . . . quam cum istis vera 
 sentire." Tusc. Disp., I. 17, 39. 
 
 STANZA LXIX. 
 
 The religious mysticism here reflected was a favor 
 ite teaching of the votaries of paganism in the fourth 
 century A.D. and implicit in the belief of Julian. 
 
 "The myths are all the expressions of God and of 
 the goodness of God; but they follow the usual 
 method of divine revelation, to wit, mystery, and alle 
 gory. The myths state clearly the one tremendous 
 fact that the Gods are; that is what Julian cared 
 about and the Christians denied: what they are the 
 myths reveal only to those who have understanding." 
 
 Sir Gilbert Murray, Four stages of Greek religion, 
 p. 158. 
 
 The most famous exponent and populizer of the 
 doctrine was Euemerus, a Greek mythographer who 
 lived in the second half of the fourth century B.C. 
 "In a kind of philosophical romance, Euemerus de 
 clared that he had sailed to some No-Man s Land, 
 Panchaea, where he found the verity about mythical 
 times engraved on pillars of bronze. This truth he 
 published in the Sacra Historia [ lera Anagraphe], 
 where he rationalised the fables, averring the gods 
 had been men, and that the myths were exaggerated 
 and distorted records of facts." Andrew Lang, Myth, 
 ritual and religion, I. 15. 
 
 The dying paganism of the fourth and fifth cen 
 turies believed that "Greek philosophy was the relic 
 of a primeval relation." Mark Pattison, Life of 
 Isaac Casaubon, p. 440. Even Dante leaned some 
 what towards this belief. Roger Bacon in the thir 
 teenth century believed that inspiration was relative, 
 not absolute, and so far qualified the current teach 
 ing of the absolute and sole divine inspiration of the 
 scriptures by holding that the ancient philosophers 
 had been partially inspired. 
 
 "God illuminated their minds," he writes, "to de 
 sire and perceive the truths of philosophy. He even 
 
 85 
 
disclosed the truth to them. The study of wisdom 
 may always increase in this life because nothing is 
 perfect in human discoveries. Therefore we later 
 men ought to supplement the defects of the ancients, 
 since we have entered into their labors, through 
 which, unless we are asses, we may be incited to im 
 prove upon them. It is a disgrace to keep using 
 merely what has been attained, and never reach 
 further for one s self." Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, 
 II. p. 492. 
 
 " The subtle transcendentalism of the Greek fathers 
 was foreign to Latin Christianity; the characteristics 
 of Roman life as reflected in Roman worship are 
 plainly visible in the Latin fathers. From Minucius 
 Felix onwards, the Christians who wrote in Latin, so 
 far from being imaginative and dreamy, are one and 
 all matter-of-fact; historical, abounding in illustra 
 tion of life and conduct; ethical rather than specu 
 lative; legal in their cast of thought rather than 
 philosophical; rhetorical in their manner of expres 
 sion rather than fervent or poetical." W. Warde 
 Fowler, Roman religious experience, p. 458. 
 
 For the influence of Roman legal and institutional 
 forms on the disappearance of myth, see Harnack, 
 History of Dogma, bk. V. ch. 2. 
 
 In his Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche holds a passion 
 ate brief for the "master-morality" of ancient pagan 
 ism. He believes that Christianity, by reason of its 
 authority, its constraint of the spirit, its dogmatism, 
 its institutionalization, has exercised a deterrent and 
 inhibiting influence upon the progress of civilization. 
 
 " The world grew older and the dream vanished. . . . 
 For this is the manner in which religions are wont to 
 die out: when, under the stern, intelligent eyes of 
 an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions 
 of a religion are systematised as a completed sum of 
 historical events, and when one begins apprehensively 
 to defend the credibility of the myth when accord 
 ingly, the feeling of myth dies out and its place is 
 taken by the claims of religion to historical founda 
 tions. ... A people and for the rest also a man 
 is worth just as much only as its ability to impress 
 
 86 
 
on its experiences the seal of eternity. . . . The con 
 trary happens when a people begins to comprehend 
 itself historically and to demolish the mythical bul 
 warks around it; with which there is usually con 
 nected a marked secularization, a breach with the 
 unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, in 
 all ethical consequences." Birth of Tragedy, pp. 
 17, 84, 177. 
 
 STANZAS LXXIII-IV. 
 
 Ipse vocat nostros animos ad sidera mundus. 
 Nam cum suspicimus magni caelestia mundi 
 Templa, super stellisque micantibus aethera fixum, 
 Luna dies et nox, et noctis signa severa 
 Et venit in mentem solis lunaeque viarum, 
 Tune aliis oppressa malis in pectora stupor, 
 Ille quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit 
 Quod forte Dei nobis immensa potestas 
 Sit, vario motu quae Candida sidera verset. 
 The very world calls our minds upward to the stars. 
 When we look up at the celestial temples of the world 
 on high, and see the sun and moon and the stars 
 the moon and the light of day, and the night with its 
 solemn fires and note the regularity of their motion, 
 we can hardly avoid the thought that it can only be 
 some infinite and divine power which wheels the 
 bright stars in their varied motion. 
 
 The sentiment in these lines is a good example of 
 what has been characterized as "the emotion which 
 is roused by sudden revelations of the infinitudes, the 
 silences and eternities that surround us." Aristotle, 
 Lucretius, Seneca, and Kant use almost the same 
 language in contemplating the heavens. Kant found 
 two things in the world still forever wonderful 
 " The starry heavens above and the moral law within." 
 Aristotle relates that to the question: What made life 
 worth living? Anaxagoras replied: "Contemplating 
 the heavens and the total order of the Cosmos." 
 
 STANZA LXXV. 
 
 Haec ego divino cupiam ad sidera flatu 
 
 Ferre, nee in turba nee turbae carmina condam. 
 
 Sed in coelo noscenda canam mirantibus astra. 
 
 87 
 
I would bear my song with divine measure unto 
 the stars. Not in the crowd nor for the crowd will I 
 build my poem. I shall sing secret things unto the 
 heavens; the stars shall hear me and marvel. 
 
 STANZA LXXX. 
 
 The phrase is from Ruskin, which I have adopted 
 as a translation of the line 
 Vita brevis nulli superest quin vita valenda. 
 
 STANZA LXXXI. 
 
 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, vol. I, p. 181, 
 has said: "Religion has been always something to 
 be done, rather than something to be thought or be 
 lieved or loved." 
 
 Both Seneca and Martial express the thought em 
 bodied in these stanzas: 
 
 Quam bene vivas refert, non quamdiu. Seneca, 
 Ep., xviii. 2. 
 
 Non est vivere, sed valere, vita. Martial, xi. 32, 8. 
 
 "Only the present," Marcus Aurelius says over and 
 over, "is ours. Neither the past nor the future are 
 ours to dispose of." 
 
 All of them, though, are echoing a saying of Epi 
 curus: "We are born once; twice we cannot be 
 born: for eternity we must be non-existent. Yet thou 
 who art not master of to-morrow, puttest off the right 
 time. The life of all of us is ruined by procrastina 
 tion, and it is on this account that each of us dies 
 before he is ready." 
 
 These two stanzas are clear reflections of the in 
 fluence of the Neo-Stoic philosophy. The Stoics 
 "found in the progress towards virtue a sufficient 
 end of existence" a philosophy which has had its 
 modern votaries. Renan said to his wife when he 
 was dying: 
 
 "Be calm and resigned. We undergo the laws of 
 nature, of which we are a manifestation. We perish, 
 
we disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the 
 march of time goes forever forward." 
 
 So also Sir Leslie Stephen has written: 
 "We may comfort ourselves, if comfort be needed, 
 by the reflection that though the memory may be 
 transitory, the good done by a noble life and char 
 acter may last far beyond any horizon which can be 
 realized by our imagination." Forgotten Benefactors 
 [last sentence]. 
 
 STANZA LXXXIII. 
 
 In the original these lines are very sonorous: 
 Nee pietas ulla est velatum saepe videri 
 Vortier ad lapidem, atque omnes accedere ad aras, 
 Necprocumbere humiprostratum,et pandere palmas. 
 
 Nor does religion consist in showing one s self 
 constantly, with veiled face, before a stone, and ap 
 proaching all the altars, nor in prostrating one s self 
 on the ground and stretching out open hands towards 
 the sanctuaries. 
 
 STANZA LXXXIV. 
 
 Perque pedes proprios nascentia carmina surgunt. 
 Per partes ducenda fides, et singula rerum 
 Sunt gradibus tradenda suis, ut cum omnia certa 
 Notitia steterint, proprios revocentur ad usus. 
 Sic mihi cunctanti tantae succedere moli 
 Materies primum rerum, ratione remota. 
 Omnia quando paulatim crescunt. 
 
 By measured steps a poem rises and comes to live. 
 I too must learn line by line, step by step, till all 
 things stand sure in knowledge. Even so I, timidly 
 endeavoring a great labor, must first collect the ma 
 terial of the building, letting wait reason s larger 
 plan. For all things grow gradually. 
 
 This is thoroughly Aurelian: "Word upon word, 
 every one by itself, must the things that are spoken 
 
 89 
 
be conceived, and understood. And so the things 
 which are done, purpose after purpose, every one by 
 itself likewise." Casaubon s translation [VII. 4]. 
 
 STANZA LXXXVI. 
 
 Lovers of Tennyson will at once recognize the 
 source of the first line of this stanza. It quite exactly 
 translates the Latin verse of the mediaeval poet: 
 
 Expetam et omnia comperiam, nil cedere certus. 
 
 STANZA LXXXVIII. 
 
 Mors via maxima, mors patet ultima linea rerum; 
 Mors acies rerum, quisquis mortem effugit 
 Contempserit ; timidum quemque consequitur. 
 Cf. Quintus Curtius, De rebus gestis Alexandri, 
 IV. 14, 25. 
 
 STANZA LXXXIX. 
 
 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, bk. II, ch. 9, hits off this 
 same thought: 
 
 "Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that 
 Sages and Martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all 
 times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony 
 through life and through death, of the God-like that 
 is in man, and how, in the God-like only has he 
 strength and freedom." 
 
 STANZA XC. 
 
 Compare Amos iii. 8: "The lion hath roared, who 
 will not fear? The Lord God hath spoken, who can 
 but prophesy"; and Hosea xi. 10: "They shall walk 
 after the Lord, who shall roar like a lion." 
 
 The lion is the symbol of strength and truth in 
 both pagan and Christian thought. Who does not 
 remember the lion in Nietzsche: Thus spake Zara- 
 thustra [pt. I. 1]: "The spirit of the lion saith I 
 will ." 
 
 90 
 
STANZA XCII. 
 
 Like Euripides in the great transition epoch of 
 Greek thought, the poet is resolved to grope his way 
 to God along the line of reason. 
 
 Fato et tempore confectus, fessusque labore, 
 At tantum, pol, quantum animo contendere possum ; 
 Nam neque decipitur ratio, nee decipit umquam. 
 Etenim alid ex alio clarescet nee mini caeca 
 Nox iter eripiet quin ultima naturae 
 Pervideam: ita res accendent lumina rebus. 
 
 Though worn by time and fate, and weary through 
 toil, yet will I keep on searching and finding all 
 things to the limit of my power. For reason never 
 deceives nor is deceived. For one thing after another 
 will grow clear, and dark night will not rob me of 
 the road or keep me from examining the ultimate 
 things of life. So old things will light the torch for 
 new things. 
 
 Compare this stanza with II. 884 f. of the Trojan 
 Women: 
 
 Base of the world, and o er the world enthroned, 
 Whoe er thou art, Unknown and hard of surmise, 
 Cause Chain of Things or Man s own Reason God 
 I give thee worship, who by noiseless paths 
 Of justice leadest all that breathes and dies. 
 
 Murray s translation. 
 
 So, in the Agamemnon, ^Eschylus says: 
 
 "Zeus, who made for man the road to thought." 
 This tribute to the power of reason is so purely Greek 
 in character that it must have been derived by the 
 poet from Lucretius. 
 
 Hugo of St. Victor was born at Hartingam in 
 Saxony in 1096, and died at the monastery of St. 
 Victor, near Paris, in 1141. He was one of the great 
 est mystics of the Middle Ages. See Haureau, Hugues 
 de St. Victor, Paris, 1859; DeWulf, History of Phil 
 osophy, sec. 204. 
 
 91 
 
STANZA XCHI. 
 
 This figure, comparing spiritual pilgrimage to 
 climbing a high mountain, is to be found in Augus 
 tine s Confessions, bk. VII [last paragraph] : 
 
 Et aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre patriam 
 pacis et iter ad earn noninvenire ... at aliud tenere 
 viam illuc ducentem. 
 
 For it is one thing from the mountain s shaggy 
 summit to see the land of peace and to find no way 
 thither . . . and another to keep on the way that 
 that leads thither. 
 
 In both instances, perhaps, the metaphor is refer 
 able to Deuteronomy xxxii. 49-50. 
 
 92 
 
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