repeat Cory's imitation of the elegiacs of Callimachus on his friend Heracleitus:—
"They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead,—
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
"And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For Death—he taketh all away, but them he cannot take."
This, to be sure, is a paraphrase, yet it conveys the feeling better than the more compact version by the poet-scholar Andrew Lang. Nothing can exceed, in its expression of the spirit, Mr. Lang's handling of Meleager's verses to the memory of his loved and lost Heliodora:—
"Tears for my lady dead,
Heliodore!
Salt tears, and strange to shed,
Over and o'er."
But I quote no more of this melody, since you can find it, in a certain romance of "Cleopatra," shining by contrast with much of that story like the "jewel in an Ethiope's ear." Others of Mr. Lang's elusive, exquisite renderings, done as it seems by the first touch, are incomparable with any lyrical exploits of their kind since "Music's wing" was folded in the dust of Shelley.
Follow the twilight path of elegiac verse to the Alexandrian epoch, and you find the clear Athenian strain succeeded by a compound of artifice and
