beauty and the love of this world, and
I am grateful for this enjoyment, and now it is time to go to sleep."
There is actually an inscription to the effect, "I have supped well of the
banquet of life." The Eastern religions, including Christianity, taught
that because everything in the world is uncertain, impermanent,
perishable, therefore we ought not to allow our minds to love worldly
things. But the Greek mind, as expressed by the old epigraphy in the
cemeteries, not less than by the teaching of Mimnermus, took exactly the
opposite view. "O children of men, it is because beauty and pleasure and
love and light can last only for a little while, it is exactly because of
this that you should love them. Why refuse to enjoy the present because it
can not last for ever?" And at a much later day the Persian poet Omar
took, you will remember, precisely the same view. You need not think that
it would be wise to accept such teaching for a rule of life, but it has a
certain value as a balance to the other extreme view, that we should make
ourselves miserable in this world with the idea of being rewarded in
another, concerning which we have no positive knowledge. The lines with
which the poem concludes at least deserve to be thought about--

But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

We shall later on take some of the purely Greek work of Cory for study,
but I want now to interest you in the more modern part of it. The charm of
the following passage you will better feel by remembering that the writer
was then a schoolmaster at Eton, and that the verses particularly express
the love which he felt for his students--a love the more profound,
perhaps, because the circumstances of the teacher's position obliged him
to appear cold and severe, obliged him to suppress natural impulses of
affection and generosity. The discipline of the masters in English public
schools is much more severe than the discipline to which the students are
subjected. The boys enjoy a great deal of liberty. The masters may be said
to have none. Yet there are men so constituted that they learn to greatly
love the profession. The title of this poem is "Reparabo," which means "I
will atone."

The world will rob me of my friends,
For time with her conspires;
But they shall both, to make amends,
Relight my slumbering fires.

For while my comrades pass away
To bow and smirk and gloze,
Come others, for as short a stay