emples in many groves:
And these be his, and all the isles he loves,
And every foreland height,
And every river hurrying to the sea.
But chief in thee,
Delos, as first it was, is his delight.
Where the long-robed Ionians, each with mate
And children, pious to his altar throng,
And, decent, celebrate
His birth with boxing-match and dance and song:
So that a stranger, happening them among,
Would deem that these Ionians have no date,
Being ageless, all so met;
And he should gaze
And marvel at their ways,
Health, wealth, the comely face
On man and woman--envying their estate--
And yet
_You_ shall he least be able to forget,
You maids of Delos, dear ones, as ye raise
The hymn to Phoebus, Leto, Artemis,
In triune praise,
Then slide your song back upon ancient days
And men whose very name forgotten is.,
And women who have lived and gone their ways:
And make them live agen,
Charming the tribes of men,
Whose speech ye mock with pretty mimicries
So true
They almost woo
The hearer to believe he's singing too!
Speed me, Apollo: speed me, Artemis!
And you, my dears, farewell! Remember me
Hereafter if, from any land that is,
Some traveller question ye--
'Maidens, who was the sweetest man of speech
Fared hither, ever chanted on this beach?'
I you beseech
Make answer to him, civilly--
'Sir, he was just a blind man, and his home
In rocky Chios. But his songs were best,
And shall be ever in the days to come.'
Say that: and as I quest
In fair wall'd cities far, I'll tell them there
(They'll list, for 'twill be true)
Of Delos and of you.
But chief and evermore my song shall be
Of Prince Apollo, lord of Archery.
God of the Silver Bow, whom Leto bare--
Leto, the lovely-tress'd.

Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of Aeschylus, a
passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, to illustrate Gibbon's
saying that the Greek language 'gave a soul to the objects of
sense, and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics.' But there
it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering
through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood
and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn:

Thee, that lord of splendid lore
Orient from old Hellas' shore.

To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of taste. I
quote another old schoolmaster h