GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
ligious key, and in certain moods not ineffective as a quaint and forceful meditation upon an ever-pressing theme. Their whole motive is condensed in the terse old formula, "All flesh is grass"; but a Sicilian poet, the pagan Moschus, found even this an insufficient image of the hopelessness of mortality. Let me give a naked translation (from the wonderful Epitaph of Bion), of the most sorrowful passage ever constructed outside of Hebrew writ:
Even the mallows—alas! alas!—when once in the garden
They, or the pale-green parsley and crisp-growing anise, have perished,
Afterward they will live and flourish again at their season;
We, the great and brave, or the wise—when death has benumbed us—
Deaf in the hollow ground a silent, infinite slumber
Sleep; forever we lie in the trance that knoweth no waking.
The drear and homely verses of Mr. Lincoln's favorite poem have already gained the suffrage of those gentlemen whose favor is such an omen of longevity—the makers of school-books. I find it in the latest Reader, along with such selections as Lincoln's "Address at Gettysburg," Read's "Sheridan's Ride," Bayard Taylor's "Scott and the Veteran," Whittier's "Barbara Freitchie," and other new-born pieces, which are to the rising generation what the "Speech of Patrick Henry," "Marco Bozzaris," or "Stand! the Ground's Your Own, My Braves!" were to ourselves, a few—it seems a very few—summers and winters ago.
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