unts arise:)
Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?

Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George
Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of
Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism.
Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize
his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He
chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet,
one of those

Whose eyes were more divinely touched
In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth.

As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of
nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the
beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_,
he expresses his unhappiness:

Still must I mourn
That every lovely thing escapes the heart
Even in the moment of its cherishing.

Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he
may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be
ennobled:

Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts.
Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace;
So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb,
Their music linger here, the joy of men.

Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros,
corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros
for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes
the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love:

The waste desire be his, and sightless fate,
Him light shall not revisit; late he knows
The love that mates the heaven weds the grave.

Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable
decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying,

In its fiery womb I saw
The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene,
And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell.

In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to
him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality:

Let not dejection on thy heart take hold
That nature hath in thee her sure effects,
And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes,
Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress,
The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain?

But, he continues,

In fair things
There is another vigor, flowing forth
From heavenly fountains, the glad energy
That broke on chaos, and the outward rus