bore
With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart—
With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart—
not since the days of "Childe Harold" have we had so superb an egotist in literature, so splendidly in revolt, so masterly in self-portraiture, so romantically posed among the lights and shadows of history, against the ruins of time. Let us forget and forgive the unfeeling cynic who inquired, "If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" Let us remember the poet who felt the "overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn" and the "intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May." Let us fix our gaze on the Pilgrim receiving the news of the blowing up of the Maine as he watches the sun set across the Nile at Assouan:
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down the débris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes
