(From Paradise Regained, Book IV)
LOOK once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
| | |
Westward, much nearer by southwest behold
| | |
Where on the Ægean shore a city stands
| | |
Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil,
| | |
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
|
5
|
And eloquence, native to famous wits
| | |
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
| | |
City or surburban, studious walks and shades;
| | |
See there the olive grove of Academe,
| | |
Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird
|
10
|
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;
| | |
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
| | |
Of bees’ industrious murmur, oft invites
| | |
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
| | |
His whispering stream: within the walls then view
|
15
|
The schools of ancient sages; his, who bred
| | |
Great Alexander to subdue the world,
| | |
Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next:
| | |
There shalt thou hear and learn the secret power
| | |
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
|
20
|
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
| | |
Æolian charms, and Dorian lyric odes,
| | |
And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
| | |
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
| | |
Whose poem Phœbus challenged for his own.
|
25
|
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
| | |
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
| | |
Of moral prudence, with delight received
| | |
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
| | |
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life;
|
30
|
High actions and high passions best describing;
| | |
Thence to the famous orators repair,
| | |
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
| | |
Wielded at will that fierce democratie,
| | |
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece,
|
35
|
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne.
| | |
|
