ethics of feeling at last must come to, in such a world as this. Pessimistic thought threatens the foundations of hedonism. On the other hand, hedonism offers a very feeble and inadequate defense against the appalling array of dark facts which cannot be denied, and sombre conclusions therefrom to be drawn on utilitarian principles. Notwithstanding those dark facts, men will continue to esteem life to be precious. But it will be, I venture to say, upon a severely ethical basis of value. Even Mr. Sully hints at a possible rejection of his standpoint, in favor of another basis, as, for example, the supreme value of moral development.

are means.

It is not upon the low ground of any happiness, howsoever or whensoever, now or hereafter, that life is to be vindicated against pessimistic questioning and despair. Our stand must be taken upon the lofty position of a moral life, to which all else is subordinated, embracing moral ends to which both pain and pleasure When duty is placed upon her throne, the realm of life is secure. When virtue for its own sake is recognized in its due precedence, as end of life, then, despite all failure otherwise, the end remains unmoved, and life is vindicated. Of this moral order a prime element is the fact of personality. Behind all doing of duties is the being, endowed with life, and therefore capable of growth, endowed with conscious life, and therefore capable of effort, toward perfection, toward the realization, that is, of the possibilities felt within and pressing for fulfillment. Thus are given that aim and purpose for humanity, the very suspicion of the absence of which casts a shade of melancholy upon every nobler spirit. Such perfection is conceded by Mr. Spencer to be an end of evolution. This perfection of human nature means not solely moral nobility, but, as implying the realization of all the possibilities of humanity, it is broad enough to have a legitimate place for science and art, and all those large and impersonal interests, without which life is necessarily narrow, and therefore dull and joyless.

In the moral order it is further involved that, of that ideal perfection, there is an eternal realization. There is a forever realized best, in the conviction whereof men may aspire and strive after the better. A divine perfection is at once the supreme reality, and also the unfailing spring and infinite inspiration of human effort. He who revealed the Father of spirits, and showed men their possible dignity as children of God, could issue to them that sublime injunction to completeness of character, “Be ye

1 Data of Ethics, sec. 62.

therefore perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." His voice our spirit may know in the quiet yet imperative claims of right, and recognize its own high lineage as child of God. Thus the divinity of duty invests life with permanent relations of dignity and nobility; somewhat as the valley of Chamonix is glorified by the immediate presence of the monarch of mountains. As, from the very precincts of the plain and prosaic village, the mountain uplifts those piles of ice and snow, and that stupendous outline, as of the great white throne itself; so, amidst this wonted routine and these prosaic surroundings, might be recognized the towering grandeur of the sublime fact of duty, an ever-present and eternal fact, a felt manifestation of the divine presence, giving a dignity and glory of consecration to the ordinary course of the daily life lived in its awful shadow.

The challenge which pessimism brings against life demands the answer of faith in the God of our life, a God of right and duty. Without God is truly to be without hope in the world. Pessimism is only the dire discovery of the hopelessness of a godless world. To be alienated from that divine life must mean misery. Hence many discords of daily life, and the age-long Miserere with its notes of anguish, and doubt, and fear. There is, even when inarticulate, yet proceeding from the deeps of human nature, a longing somehow to be redeemed from evil, made at one with the source of goodness, and so brought again into the harmony which means union of human and divine. One-only has ever claimed to be able to redeem the world from this discord of evil, make man at one with God, and thus restore the harmonious blessedness of life in Him. In his gospel is thus the key to "the riddle of the painful earth." Burdened with earth's pain and woe, the thoughtful heart may easily fall into a dull despair, that sees nothing beyond

"the arbitrator of despairs,

Just death, kind umpire of men's miseries." But, having the revelation of God, the heart may go on, putting perhaps more than dying Mortimer's meaning into that next line,

"With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence."

Yes! In this moral order, as Kant demonstrated, are involved God and immortality. These transcendent truths the gospel proclaims anew in fuller revelation. A secure refuge from the misery of pessimism is afforded only by faith in a higher realm of truth and righteousness and love, an eternal order transcending

the limitations and shocks of time, while consecrating and blessing the course of this world. In that eternal order this temporal life has issue, as the river in the sea; and, as the river's current is affected by the mysterious tide that sets up from ocean, so this temporal life may be influenced by the eternal order whereunto it is tributary, and feel, making far up its narrow, fretted channel, the mighty tide of a full, unmeasured, and resistless joy, from the great deep of the righteousness and love of God.

Chauncey B. Brewster.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.

APOLLONIUS OF RHODES AND THE ARGONAUTICA.1

In the revival of Greek poetry at Alexandria in the third century before Christ, when literary art was brought to as high an excellence as it can ever attain without the inspiration of an earlier and more unconscious genius, the learned poets of the court of the Ptolemies returned to those forms of composition in which Hellenism had embodied its first words of song, - forms which, by centuries of familiarity, had become dear, almost sacred, to the hearts of the Greeks; and in the epic and the elegy we see the perfection of Alexandrianism. The period has a profound interest, not only to the student of the human mind in its more conscious workings, but also to the critic of literary art; for much of the poetry of this epoch, artificial and uninspired as it often is, deserves attentive study; and we especially of the present day, with whom laborious investigation of subtle points and carefully wrought niceties of expression too often take the place of originality, breadth, and force, may learn something from a period marked by similar characteristics. The learning, appreciation, and spirit of a Frenchman, Auguste Couat, have lighted up the subject, and under his guidance the study of the principal poets of Alexandri anism is no uninteresting occupation. Five centuries after Christ the poet Nonnus uttered the "swan-song of Greek literature;"

1 The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Translated into English Prose from the Text of R. Merkel, by Edward P. Coleridge, B. A. London: George Bell and Sons. 1889.

La Poésie Alexandrine sous les Trois Premiers Ptolémées, par Auguste Couat. Paris, 1882.

the tendencies which led to the decline and extinction of that wonderful development of the Greek artistic spirit are visible in the Alexandrian poets, and Nonnus was but the last link in a chain which began with Homer.

The story of the Argonauts, as told by Apollonius, has only recently become accessible to modern English readers. Mr. William Morris has, indeed, made use of the legend in his "Life and Death of Jason;" but he has treated it with considerable freedom, and mingled the classic and romantic elements, the Homeric and the Spencerian style, in his own happy manner.1 Mr. Coleridge's translation of the "Argonautica," which has lately appeared, though occasionally inexact, gives, on the whole, a good rendering in not unpleasing English; and in this form the poem may well claim the attention of the general reader.

Born about 235 B. C., probably in Alexandria itself, at that time the centre of literature and art, the "eye of Greece," or of all that remained of the Grecian spirit, - Apollonius was surrounded from the first by those influences which cultivate taste and stimulate the mental faculties. He seems early to have devoted himself to the pursuit of literature; he became a disciple of Callimachus, the poet laureate of his day; and we may infer that he belonged to a family of high standing and wealth. With Callimachus, the dictatorial representative of the fashionable school of poetry, he must have received an orthodox training in the arts of composition, invention, and borrowing; he must have found delight and inspiration in the wondrous heritage of the classical genius, heritage which has descended to us sadly diminished, — and been taught to regard with reverence, if not always with just criticism, the poets of the earlier time. For Callimachus and his partisans, in the spirit of a popular school of modern fiction, maintained that the function of the poet was not to compose great epics which should rival Homer, but pieces less ambitious in design, more perfect in finish and in studied elegance.

a

The characteristic of Alexandrianism was its learning. The magnificent library founded by the Ptolemies gave its readers such opportunities for study as ancient scholars nowhere else enjoyed; and the list of librarians from 282 to 173 B. C. is a succession of great names that needs no comment: Zenodotus, Theocritus, Aratus, Callimachus, Eratosthenes, Apollonius, Aristophanes, Aristarchus. Endowed with far more of genius than any of the other epic poets of his time, and perhaps more deserving

1 See the chapter on "Esthetic Poetry," in Mr. Walter Pater's Appreciations.

of immortality than any later poet except Theocritus, Apollonius shared the spirit of his age and school, which borrowed more than it invented, and devoted its labor to happy combination and elegant expression. In the "Progymnasmata" of Theon we have the characteristic expression, 'Aváyvwσis tpopǹ déέews, — “Reading is the nourishment of style;" and while it is not certain that this saying is rightly assigned to the author of the "Argonautica,' the words may well have been his motto. The dry and tedious scholia on his poem have at least this interest, that they give us some knowledge of the poet's vast field of reading; and in noting suggestions, similarities, or borrowings, Lucillus, Theon, Sophocles, and Irenæus, the Dryasdusts of the reign of Tiberius, have cited a long list of two hundred and seventeen authors. The wonder is, not that he fell short of the highest degree of originality, but that his genius was not altogether crushed by the weight of his acquirements, and that he could win for himself, as he has done, the distinction of having first treated that romantic love which is the dominating passion of modern literature. Apollonius stands with Virgil upon a middle ground between the ancient poetry, sublime in the ideas of fate, nemesis, and the powerlessness of man, and the modern poetry, grand in its conceptions of passion and of the strength of human personality. "These laborious imitators of antique art," says Couat, "were the creators of a new art; these preservers of the past were the initiators of future progress."

Yet the Alexandrians, in their efforts to combine erudition and high literary finish with a close imitation of the works of antiquity, were by no means agreed as to the aims and methods of artistic composition. Innovation and conservatism were, as ever, at variance; and the Greek Anthology contains many traces of the curious and bitter struggle. The one party would seek its models in Homer, or, still better, in Hesiod and Antimachus, the types of learned mythology; the other condemned the audacity of such ambitious attempts, and pointed with pride to certain short pieces of the newer style, replete with all that delicate finish and grace which, it is intimated, Homer lacks. Méya Bißλíov, said Callimachus, in words which became proverbial, μéya kaкóv,—“A big book is a great plague." The natural retort followed: finical minuteness, laborious attention to words rather than to ideas, obscurity, were charged upon those whe cultivated this style. Antiphanes vented his feelings in this epigram:

"A