n
from time to time since the Revival of Letters a tendency to selfish
and somewhat sickly theories so-called of life, where sensibility
degenerates through self-consciousness into affectation, and
efforts to appreciate fully the delightfulness of life and art are
overstrained into a wearisome literary voluptuousness, where duty has
already disappeared and the human sympathies on which duty is based
scarcely linger in a faint aesthetic form, soon to leave the would-be
exquisiteness to putrefy into the vulgarity of egoism. Such tendencies
have less in common with the Hellenic prime than with the court of
Leo the Tenth, though even that had perhaps an advantage over them as
being in some ways a more real thing. But that the Hellenic prime with
all its exquisite sensibility was deficient in recognition of a high
ideal of duty can never be believed among those who have studied it
candidly and attentively; I have endeavoured above to suggest that in
this point, take it all in all, it yields to no age or race. It would
indeed be a mistaken following of those noble servants of humanity
to draw from their memories an argument for selfish isolation or for
despair of the commonwealth of man. He who has drunk deeply of that
divine well and gazed long at the fair vision of what then was, will,
if his nature be capable of true sympathy with the various elements
of that wonderful age, turn again without bitterness to the confused
modern world, saddened but not paralysed by the comparison, grieving,
but with no querulous grief, for the certainty that those days are
done.

1874.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The few notes appended to this translation are not intended to supply
the place of such reference to Dictionaries of Mythology, Antiquities
and Geography, as is needful to the student of Pindar who is not
already somewhat accomplished in knowledge of the customs, history
and legendary traditions of Hellas. And although it may reasonably be
supposed that the chief of these will be already known to most readers
of Pindar, yet so profusely allusive is this poet that to understand
his allusions will very often require knowledge which would not have
been derived from a study of the more commonly read Hellenic writers.

Nor have I attempted to trace in detail the connection of the parts
in each ode which binds them into one harmonious whole with many
meanings--a connection so consummately contrived where we can trace it
that we may suppose