Ah! the pity of it! Thou
Poor Bird! thy doing 'tis that now
My Loved One's eyes are swollen and red
With weeping for her darling dead."[1]
Almost as pathetic, and quite as musical as this melancholy dirge, are some of the epigrams to be found in that charming volume of translations from the Greek Anthology, which Lilla Cabot Perry has aptly entitled From the Garden of Hellas. Here we have graceful and tender verses dedicated to the memory of pet beasts and birds and insects, one of them, indeed, bewailing the hard fate of a locust and a cicada, which, beloved by the same mistress, sleep, equally lamented, side by side:
"Unto the locust, nightingale of fields,
And the cicada, who was wont to drowse
Through summer heat amid the oaken boughs,
This common tomb the maiden Myro builds;
And, like a child, weeps that she could not save
These twain, her cherished playthings, from the grave."
What can be prettier than such a requiem sung by Leonidas, and breathing in every line a
- ↑ Translated by Sir Theodore Martin.
