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As so many years have intervened, since I chanced to have that conversation with Dr. Johnson in my house, to which you refer, I have forgotten most of what then passed, but remember that I was both instructed and entertained by it. He also repeated to me a Latin ode he had composed in one of the western islands, from which he had lately returned.
No ingenuity, no evasion, can give any escape from these plain principles. Either you must revoke the maxims of the American Revolution, or you must enfranchise woman. If there is any one who is recognized as a fair exponent of our national principles, it is our martyr-president Abraham Lincoln; whom Lowell calls, in his noble Commemoration Ode at Cambridge,
Once more the ivory knobs are tapped; and long-drawn, golden sounds are heard-some ode to Cleopatra; slowly loom, and solemnly expand, vast, rounding orbs of beauty; and before me float innumerable queens, deep dipped in silver gauzes. All this could Carlo do make, unmake me; build me up; to pieces take me; and join me limb to limb. He is the architect of domes of sound, and bowers of song.
The opening of the second great Exhibition in the month of May must have been full of painful associations. At the State ceremony on the first day the royal carriages with mourning liveries were empty, but for the Crown Prince of Prussia, Prince Oscar of Sweden, and the Duchess of Cambridge with her daughters. Tennyson's ode was sung. It contained the pathetic lines
Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its God, feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is fainting almost quiet away." Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion. Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"
Nay over all Hellas if thou searchest, thou shalt find more than one sight can view. O king Zeus the Accomplisher, grant them with so light feet to move through life, give them all honour, and sweet hap of their goodly things. This ode was to be sung, probably by a chorus of boys, at the winner's city Orchomenos, and most likely in the temple of the three or Graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia.
The obsession of style is well exemplified by a comparison of Dionysius and Longinus in their discussion of Sappho's literary art. Longinus praises her passion, and her masterful selection of images which realize it for the reader, while Dionysius, no less enthusiastic, points out that in the ode which he quotes there is not a single case of hiatus.
As for Charaxos, when after redeeming Rhodopis he returned back to Mytilene, Sappho in an ode violently abused him. Of Rhodopis then I shall say no more.
The quality which the man possesses may be that which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds, or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of Frederick at Leuthen or Nelson at Trafalgar.
The Rector was sitting by the fire in his retiring-room, reading a winter ode of Horace, and as faint sounds of war reached his ears he would stir the fire and lament, like the quiet old scholar that he was, that Providence had made him ruler of such a band of barbarians; but he would also cherish the hope that his barbarians would not come off second.
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