Lo, Nestor now, whose stately age Through threefold lives of mortals lives!-- The laurel'd bowl, the kingly sage To Hector's tearful mother gives. "Drink--in the draught new strength is glowing, The grief it bathes forgets the smart! O Bacchus! wond'rous boons bestowing, Oh how thy balsam heals the heart! Drink--in the draught new vigour gloweth, The grief it bathes forgets the smart-- And balsam to the breaking heart, The healing god bestoweth. "As Niobe, when weeping mute, To angry gods the scorn and prey, But tasted of the charmed fruit, And cast despair itself away; So, while unto thy lips, its shore, This stream of life enchanted flows, Remember'd grief, that stung before, Sinks down to Lethè's calm repose. So, while unto thy lips, its shore, The stream of life enchanted flows-- Drown'd deep in Lethè's calm repose, The grief that stung before!" Seized by the god--behold the dark And dreaming Prophetess[5] arise! She gazes from the lofty bark, Where Home's dim vapour wraps the skies-- "A vapour, all of human birth! As mists ascending, seen and gone, So fade earth's great ones from the earth, And leave the changeless gods alone! Behind the steed that skirs away, Or on the galley's deck--sits Care! To-morrow comes--and Life is where? At least--we'll live to-day!" [2] Ulysses. [3] Need we say to the general reader, that Oileus here alludes to the strife between Ajax and Ulysses, which has furnished a subject to the Greek tragic poet, who has depicted, more strikingly than any historian, that intense emulation for glory, and that mortal agony in defeat, which made the main secret of the prodigious energy of the Greek character? The poet, in taking his hero from the Homeric age, endowed him with the feelings of the Athenian republicans he addressed. [4] Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. [5] Cassandra. * * * * * RUDOLPH OF HAPSBURG.--A BALLAD. [Hinrichs properly classes this striking ballad (together with the yet grander one of the "Fight with the Dragon") amongst those designed to depict and exalt the virtue of Humility. The source of the story is in Ægidius Tschudi--a Swiss chronicler--and Schiller (who, as Hinrichs suggests,) probably met with it in the researches connected with the compositions of his drama, "William Tell," appears to have adhered, with much fidelity, to the original narrative.]