the opposite view.  “O children of men, it is because beauty and pleasure and love and light can last only for a little while, it is exactly because of this that you should love them.  Why refuse to enjoy the present because it can not last for ever?” And at a much later day the Persian poet Omar took, you will remember, precisely the same view.  You need not think that it would be wise to accept such teaching for a rule of life, but it has a certain value as a balance to the other extreme view, that we should make ourselves miserable in this world with the idea of being rewarded in another, concerning which we have no positive knowledge.  The lines with which the poem concludes at least deserve to be thought about—­

  But oh, the very reason why
  I clasp them, is because they die.

We shall later on take some of the purely Greek work of Cory for study, but I want now to interest you in the more modern part of it.  The charm of the following passage you will better feel by remembering that the writer was then a schoolmaster at Eton, and that the verses particularly express the love which he felt for his students—­a love the more profound, perhaps, because the circumstances of the teacher’s position obliged him to appear cold and severe, obliged him to suppress natural impulses of affection and generosity.  The discipline of the masters in English public schools is much more severe than the discipline to which the students are subjected.  The boys enjoy a great deal of liberty.  The masters may be said to have none.  Yet there are men so constituted that they learn to greatly love the profession.  The title of this poem is “Reparabo,” which means “I will atone.”

  The world will rob me of my friends,
    For time with her conspires;
  But they shall both, to make amends,
    Relight my slumbering fires.

  For while my comrades pass away
    To bow and smirk and gloze,
  Come others, for as short a stay;
    And dear are these as those.

  And who was this? they ask; and then
    The loved and lost I praise: 
  “Like you they frolicked; they are men;
    Bless ye my later days.”

  Why fret?  The hawks I trained are flown;
    ’Twas nature bade them range;
  I could not keep their wings half-grown,
    I could not bar the change.

  With lattice opened wide I stand
    To watch their eager flight;
  With broken jesses in my hand
    I muse on their delight.

  And oh! if one with sullied plume
    Should droop in mid career,
  My love makes signals,—­“There is room,
    O bleeding wanderer, here.”