III.

"In vain! in vain! The seventh bright day Is breaking o'er yon eastern land,

That mid the light-a long dark bandLies dim and shadowy far away;

And still from morn till eve I've scann'd

That weary sea from strand to strand,
To mark his sail against the spray.
In vain! in vain! The morning ray
Shows not his bark mid all the seas,

Tho' I may trace from where I stand,
All the flowery Cyclades.

"Seven days! But oh! how tardily
Those lonely hours have crept away!
And yet it seems but yesterday
That, sailing o'er the Cretan Sea,

I watch'd the melting shadows gray,
And hail'd the dawn as emblem gay
Of all the rapture yet to be,
When I with him should wander free,

Through fair Ilissus' bowers of green.
But now my love has gone for aye,
And I am left alone alway,

To brood o'er all that might have been !

"Oh! had I to the shadows pass'd,

Before the dark-eyed stranger came To light with love the fatal flame That aye will burn within my breast!

The maids of Crete had named my name,

Nor thought of love, nor yet of shame,

But of a sister pure and chaste,
In Death's cold arms untimely pressed,
And all from joy and sorrow reft:

He might have lived his life of fame,
And I had ne'er been loved and left!

"Or had the North Wind woke from sleep,
As with our dark sails all outspread,
Across the southern wave we fled,-
Down in the great Sea's twilight deep,
Some silent grot had been our bed,
Where many a long-hair'd Nereïd,
With ocean-flowers all garlanded,

Had knelt by our low couch to weep:

But softly o'er the brine the breeze did creep,
Bearing us all too gently on our way;

While I of strong Poseidon pray'd
To guard the life I mourn to-day!

"Ye memories of days gone by

Ere clouds of woe began to lower,
When life stretch'd all so bright before,
And love was warm and hope was high;-
Of moonlight nights beside the shore,
When by the infinite heaven he swore,
And every star that gemm'd it o'er,-
That love like his could never die :
Unbidden guests of mine adversity!

Dead hopes and haunting memories of the Past,
That cling about my heart for evermore-
Oh! to forget you all, and die and be at rest!

"For rest alone awaiteth me

Beyond Death's portal dark and grim, Where Nature whispers that I soon shall be; For robes of rest I cannot see

Seem folding round each languid limb:

My weary eyes are waxing dim,
Scarce may I hear the evening hymn

The birds are chanting joyously:

But oh! for one more glimpse of thee,

Theseus before mine eyelids sink for aye,-
Or of thy sail beneath the westering day,
O'er the horizon's utmost rim,

Looming far away!"

IV.

Darkness o'er land and sea resum'd her sway,
The fair Moon rose, dispensing silvery light,
And softly fell the tears of mother Night
O'er the outwearied watcher where she lay,
Till in the Orient dawned again the Day,

And all for joy o'er his triumphant birth,
Arose the hymnèd praises of the Earth:
The River murmured, rolling on his way,
The wind-swept Forest sigh'd, and carols gay

The wild bird litted from the dewy brake-
But Ariadne sleeps, and never more shall wake!

The History of a Fable.

AN EPISODE FROM THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE.

WHEN we compare closely the literary history of different peoples and ages, we cannot fail to remark how little of what is supposed to be nationally characteristic is really new, and how much is but a repetition, or at most but a development, of something which has existed before. It would appear almost as though the germs of certain forms of literary conception existed naturally in the human mind, and only awaited the genial impulse from without which was to bring them forth; while other forms pass, often by routes which we can no longer trace, from people to people, receiving more or less development in their onward progress. The literature itself is a long existing-a primitive and enduring-fact, while that which constitutes temporary or national character is an accidental modification. The case of dramatic literature, which at first glance would seem least capable of being reconciled with this fact, is indeed an apt example of the first of these classes of development, that of natural growth; for though the modern drama and the drama of antiquity are sufficiently alike to have been one imitated from the other, yet nothing is more certain than that they are perfectly independent formations, each having originated similarly in primæval religious ceremonies, and gone through a very similar course of growth. The development of modern dramatic literature had been almost completed, before the moderns had any intimate knowledge of the ancient theatre. We are, of course, here using the word modern in contradistinction to antiquity, in the usual historical sense of the word, and include under it the middle ages. We shall best display the history of the other, the migratory class of popular literature, by tracing it in one of its simplest forms; and perhaps we could not give a better example than that which is presented in the history of a fable.

That a fable is a class of literature not altogether to be despised even in the present age, is a fact which has been proclaimed to the world by a minister of state, our present home secretary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in a scholar-like edition of the Greek fables of Babrius, which, it may be added by the way, have just been carefully translated into English verse by another classical scholar who is favourably known to the world, the Rev. James Davies. Sir George holds that the fable originated in Greece, but his arguments appear to us by no means conclusive, and we are inclined to adopt a different opinion. The characteristic feature of this class of stories-which consists in making animals act, reason, and talk, like men-is itself so singular, and so contrary to universal experience, that we

can only imagine it to have been invented in a peculiar condition of tl.e popular intelligence; and such a condition, as far as we know, is presented to us alone in the religious creed of the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, held by the ancient inhabitants of India. It is exactly in the literature of this people that we find what appear to be the oldest fables known; and these fables have a peculiar character of their own which identifies them with the people and the country. In such of them as are identical with the ancient or medieval fables current in Europe, we see at once, on a comparison, the change which has taken place in their transmission to accommodate the difference of circumstances in their new location; and this has sometimes so modified the story, as to render it only fully intelligible when we can recur to the original. Thus, an old European story tells us how six men played a trick upon a country-fellow, who was carrying a lamb for sale in the market. They agree to meet him one by one, and to persist in the same story that it was a dog he was carrying, and not a lamb. In the sequel, the astonishment of the rustic becomes so great that he lets them carry off the lamb in triumph. It must be confessed that there is not much point in this story; but when we look to its Indian original, we have no further difficulty in understanding it. There the victim is a Brahmin, who is carrying in his arms a goat intended for a religious sacrifice, when he meets three robbers, who, by a previous arrangement, one after another, and apparently without complicity, call the goat a dog. Now a dog was, in the Brahminical creed, an unclean animal, and the moment the Brahmin's belief in the kind of animal he carried was shaken, he threw it down in horror, and fled. Again, in the well-known story, current in almost every country of medieval Europe, and localized as a Welsh legend at Beddgelert, on the slopes of Snowdon, of the man who had slaughtered his favourite hound in the hasty belief that it had caused the death of his child, but discovered, when too late, that the dog had, on the contrary, saved the child's life by killing a serpent which had attempted to destroy it, there is something not much in accordance with European sentiments in the notion of a dog killing a serpent. But in the original story in the Sanscrit, it is a favourite mangoust, or ichneumon, for which a dog has been substituted in the European version of the story. This change makes all clear; for among the ancient Hindoos the mangoust was domesticated like a cat, and served the same purpose of killing rats and mice; and we know that that animal, when in a wild state, kills and eats serpents. Every reader will remember the old Esopean fable of "The Cat and the Goddess Venus." A cat fell in love with a handsome young man, and petitioned the goddess to change her into a beautiful woman. Venus granted her prayer, and the cat, thus metamorphosed, was espoused to the object of her admiration; but one day, as they were fondling on a couch, Venus, rather maliciously, let loose a mouse in the room, which the transformed cat no sooner saw, than she sprang from the couch, and pursued to kill and eat it. The goddess, indignant at seeing that she had preserved an instinct so unbecoming in a lady, restored her