DEATH AND SISYPHUS.

147

Where I may dream that hidden waters lie;
As pitiless as to some shipwrecked man,
Who, gazing from his narrow shoal of sand
On the wide unspecked round of blue and blue,
Sees that full light is errorless despair.
The insects' hum that slurs the silent dark
Startles, and seems to cheat me, as the tread
Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher
Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause,
And hears them never pause, but pass and die.

George Eliot.

DEATH AND SISYPHUS.

(HIS DOOM.)

AND all things prospered well with Sisyphus :

Out of the profits of his stolen beeves

He built him ships and traded to far seas,
And every wind brought gold;

And with the gold he hired himself armed men,
And by their aid ruled far and wide as king;
Filled justice-halls with judges incorrupt,
Temples with priests austere :

148

DEATH AND SISYPHUS.

And from a petty hamlet Corinth rose,

With heaven-kissed towers, above a twofold sea ; And where gaunt robbers prowled through forest glooms,

And herds grazed leagues of waste,

The boor in safety carolled at his plough

And ample garners hived the golden grain:
Thus each man's interest led to all men's law;
And, born of iron rule,

Order arose to harmonise brute force;

And glimmered on the world the dawn of Greece. For if the gods permit the bad to thrive,

'Tis for the ends of good,

As tyrants sow the harvest freemen reap.
But Sisyphus built temples and deck'd shrines,
Not for religious homage to the gods,

But as the forts of thrones.

There was no altar in his secret soul:
If he prized law, law legalises power;

And conquest, commerce, tax, and tribute were
The beeves he stole as king.

DEATH AND SISYPHUS.

149

So he had lived long 'mid honours, feasts, and

gear;

But age came on and anguish and disease.

Man ever thinks, in bargaining with Zeus,
To cheat and ever fails.

And weary, weary seemed the languid day,
Joyless the feast, and glitterless the gold,

Till racked with pain, one night on Death he called
And passed with Death away.

But when his line was with the things no more,
And to revile the old race pleased the new,
All his misdeeds rose life-like from his tomb,
And spoke from living tongues.

And awful legends of some sentence grim,
Passed on his guilty soul in Tartarus,
Floated like vapours from the nether deep,
And tinged the sunlit air.

But by a priest in Saïs I was told

A tale, not known in Greece, of this man's doom, That when the Thracian Orpheus, in the Shades, Sought his Eurydice,

150

DEATH AND SISYPHUS.

He heard, tho' in the midst of Erebus,
Song sweet as his muse-mother made his own;
It broke forth from a solitary ghost,

Who, up a vaporous hill,

Heaved a huge stone that kept rebounding back,
And still the ghost upheaved it and still sang.
In the brief pause from toil while towards the height
Reluctant rolled the stone,

The Thracian asked in wonder, "Who art thou, Voiced like Heaven's lark amidst the night of

66

Hell?"

My name on earth was Sisyphus," replied The phantom.

66

In the Shades

"I keep mine earthly wit; I have duped the Three, They gave me work for torture; work is joy. Slaves work in chains, and to the clank they sing.” Said Orpheus, "Slaves still hope!"

"And could I strain to heave up the huge stone Did I not hope that it would reach the height? There penance ends, and dawn Elysian fields." "But if it never reach ?"

The Thracian sighed, as looming through the mist The stone came whirling back. "Fool," said the

ghost,

"Then mine at worst is everlasting hope."

Again uprose the stone.

Lord Lytton.

SONNET.

(ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMer.) MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne :
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Keats.