TO PROFESSOR JEBB

WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM

Addressed to Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Professor of Greek at St. Andrews, Scotland, and afterwards at Cambridge, England, one of the most eminent Hellenists of our day. The footnotes are the poet's own.

FAIR things are slow to fade away,
Bear witness you, that yesterday

From out the Ghost of Pindar in you Roll'd an Olympian; and they say 2

That here the torpid mummy wheat
Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet

As that which gilds the glebe of Eng-
land,

Sunn'd with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend for awhile,
If greeted by your classic smile,

Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna, Blossom again on a colder isle.

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE

(IN ENNA)

The present Lord Tennyson says in the 'Memoir,' (vol. ii. p. 364): The poem was written at my request, because I knew that he considered Demeter one of the most beautiful types of womanhood.'

FAINT as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land, And can no more, thou camest, O my child, Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,

Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb With passing thro' at once from state to state,

Until I brought thee hither, that the day, When here thy hands let fall the gather'd flower,

Might break thro' clouded memories once again

On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale

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Of blank earth - baldness clothes itself afresh,

And breaks into the crocus-purple hour 50 That saw thee vanish.

Child, when thou wert gone, I envied human wives, and nested birds, Yea, the cubb'd lioness; went in search of thee

Thro' many a palace, many a cot, and gave Thy breast to ailing infants in the night, And set the mother waking in amaze

To find her sick one whole; and forth again Among the wail of midnight winds, and cried,

'Where is my loved one? Wherefore do ye wail?'

And out from all the night an answer shrill'd,

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'We know not, and we know not why we wail.'

I climb'd on all the cliffs of all the seas, And ask'd the waves that moan about the world,

Where? do ye make your moaning for my child?'

And round from all the world the voices came,

'We know not, and we know not why we moan.'

Where?' and I stared from every eaglepeak,

I thridded the black heart of all the woods, I peer'd thro' tomb and cave, and in the