In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogiton brave, When the twain on Athena’s day Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay. For aye shall your fame in the land be told, Harmodius and Aristogiton bold, Who, striking the tyrant down, Made Athens a freeman’s town.” PROF. CONINGTON. The flower-songs of the Greeks were especially beautiful; children enjoyed their nursery rhymes; while in the Lay of the Swallow, the penniless bard, chanting at the gate, sought an avenue to the charity of his rich neighbor. FROM THE LAY OF THE SWALLOW. “The swallow is here, the swallow is here, She comes to proclaim the reviving year; With her jet-black hood, and her milk-white breast, She is come, she is come, at our behest, The harbinger of the beautiful spring, To claim your generous offering. Let your bountiful door its wealth outpour, What is little to you is to us great store; A bunch of dry figs, and a savory cruse Of pottage the swallow will not refuse; With a basket of cheese and a barley cake, And a cup of red wine our thirst to slake.”—MURE. The creations of the lyric muse are graceful, touching, and true to nature. We regret not to exchange the sublime heights of epic poetry for an humbler field in which we may commune with the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, of humanity. Here, as Tegner says, Greek poetry arises “slender, smooth, erect like the palm-tree with its rich yet symmetrical crown; and a nightingale sits among the leaves and sings.” THE ELEGY. The Ionians, first to free themselves from kingly rule, gave to the Hellenic world the earliest forms of lyric poetry,—the elegiac couplet and the lighter iambic verse appropriate to satire. These twin-born metres, of Ionian parentage, grew up side by side in Greece. In the elegiac couplet, a dactylic line of five feet or their equivalent followed the sonorous hexameter,[26] constituting a livelier measure than the old heroic verse, which consisted of hexameters alone. The Greek elegy was not necessarily plaintive; on the contrary, it did good service in rousing to action in time of war, and gave fitting expression to the spirit of the banquet-hall. =Callinus.=—The inventor of this metre was Calli’nus of Eph’esus, in Ionia, who flourished between 730 and 678 B.C. He attempted by it to excite his countrymen against a horde of barbarian invaders; but the people were too much enervated by intercourse with the effeminate nations of Asia to respond to his thrilling strains. The following is a fragment of Callinus, perhaps the oldest war-elegy in existence:—