And every river hurrying to the sea. 
     But chief in thee,
  Delos, as first it was, is his delight. 
  Where the long-robed Ionians, each with mate
  And children, pious to his altar throng,
     And, decent, celebrate
  His birth with boxing-match and dance and song: 
  So that a stranger, happening them among,
  Would deem that these Ionians have no date,
  Being ageless, all so met;
     And he should gaze
     And marvel at their ways,
  Health, wealth, the comely face
  On man and woman—­envying their estate—­
     And yet
  You shall he least be able to forget,
  You maids of Delos, dear ones, as ye raise
  The hymn to Phoebus, Leto, Artemis,
     In triune praise,
  Then slide your song back upon ancient days
  And men whose very name forgotten is.,
  And women who have lived and gone their ways: 
  And make them live agen,
  Charming the tribes of men,
  Whose speech ye mock with pretty mimicries
     So true
     They almost woo
  The hearer to believe he’s singing too! 
  Speed me, Apollo:  speed me, Artemis! 
  And you, my dears, farewell!  Remember me
  Hereafter if, from any land that is,
  Some traveller question ye—­
  ’Maidens, who was the sweetest man of speech
  Fared hither, ever chanted on this beach?’
     I you beseech
  Make answer to him, civilly—­
  ’Sir, he was just a blind man, and his home
  In rocky Chios.  But his songs were best,
  And shall be ever in the days to come.’ 
  Say that:  and as I quest
  In fair wall’d cities far, I’ll tell them there
     (They’ll list, for ’twill be true)
     Of Delos and of you. 
  But chief and evermore my song shall be
  Of Prince Apollo, lord of Archery. 
  God of the Silver Bow, whom Leto bare—­
     Leto, the lovely-tress’d.

Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of Aeschylus, a passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, to illustrate Gibbon’s saying that the Greek language ’gave a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics.’  But there it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn: 

     Thee, that lord of splendid lore
     Orient from old Hellas’ shore.

To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of taste.  I quote another old schoolmaster here—­a dead friend, Sidney Irwin: 

What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice, boastfulness, and display of all kinds....  The Greeks hated all monsters.  The quaint phrase in the “Odyssey” about the Queen of the Laestrygones—­’She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her’—­would have seemed to them most reasonable....  To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—­of condensing—­a