us! let us sing with Lucretius, one of the great
interpreters of Greek thought. How grand and how true is his paean!

Out of the night, out of the blinding night
Thy beacon flashes;--hail, beloved light
Of Greece and Grecian; hail, for in the mirk
Thou cost reveal each valley and each height.

Thou art my leader, and the footprints shine,
Wherein I plant my own....

* * * * *

The world was shine to read, and having read,
Before thy children's eyes thou didst outspread
The fruitful page of knowledge, all the wealth
Of wisdom, all her plenty for their bread.

(Bk. III.--Translated by D. A. Slater.)

Let us come out of the murky night of the East, heavy with
phantoms,
into the bright daylight of the West, into the company of men
whose
thoughts made our thoughts, and whose ways made our ways--the men
who first dared to look on nature with the clear eyes of the
mind.

Browning's famous poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," is an
allegory of the pilgrimage of man through the dark places of the earth,
on a dismal path beset with demons, and strewn with the wreckage of
generations of failures. In his ear tolled the knell of all the lost
adventurers, his peers, all lost, lost within sight of the dark Tower
itself--

The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world.

lost in despair at an all-encircling mystery. Not so the Greek Childe
Roland who set the slug-horn to his lips and blew a challenge. Neither
Shakespeare nor Browning tells us what happened, and the old legend,
Childe Roland, is the incarnation of the Greek spirit, the young,
light-hearted master of the modern world, at whose trumpet blast the
dark towers of ignorance, superstition and deceit have vanished into
thin air, as the baseless fabric of a dream. Not that the jeering
phantoms have flown! They still beset, in varied form, the path of each
generation; but the Achaian Childe Roland gave to man self-confidence,
and taught him the lesson that nature's mysteries, to be solved, must
be challenged. On a portal of one of the temples of Isis in Egypt was
carved: "I am whatever hath been, is, or ever will be, and my veil no
man has yet lifted."

The veil of nature the Greek lifted and herein lies his value to us.
What of this Genius? How did it arise among the peoples of