_I'll borrow life, and not grow old; And nightingales and trees Shall keep me, though the veins be cold, As young as Sophocles_. And again, in poignant notes: _You promise heavens free from strife, Pure truth, and perfect change of will; But sweet, sweet is this human life, So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; Your chilly stars I can forego, This warm, kind world is all I know_. This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he clung to them: _All beauteous things for which we live By laws of time and space decay. But oh! the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die_. There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in _Ionica_, and this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats and André Chenier. Many of these have been so brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But in _Ionica_ something is given which the others have not known how to give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little rites and playful superstitions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built a tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost; why the shining hair of Lysidice, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian fanatics turned inside out; for all their vehemence they can never lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true of the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. The Cross prevailed at their nativity, and has thrown its shadow over their conscience. But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of the _Ionica_, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact; I merely note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular poems.