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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. | |
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