No More Learning

D. He lived to an advanced age, but the year of his death
is unknown. Rome he evidently knew well, and from long experience.
But there is great obscurity about his career. His "Satires," in
declamatory indignation, form a powerful contrast to the genial mockery
of Horace (p. 91): where Horace may be said to have a Chaucerian smile
for human weakness, Juvenal displays the wrath of a Langland. Juvenal
denounces abuses at Rome in unmeasured terms. Frequently Zolaesque in
his methods of exposing vice, he contrives by his realism to produce
a loathing for the objects of his attack. Dryden rendered into free
and vigorous English several of the satires; and Gifford wrote a
complete translation, often of great merit. The translation here has,
with adaptations, been drawn from both, and a few lines have been
incorporated from Johnson, whose two best-known poems, "London" and
"The Vanity of Human Wishes," were paraphrases from Juvenal.




FRIEDRICH KLOPSTOCK[R]




The Messiah


_I. --The Mount of Olives_

Rejoice, ye sons of earth, in the honour bestowed on man. He who was
before all worlds, by Whom all things in this visible creation were
made, descended to our earth as your Redeemer. Near Jerusalem, once
the city where God displayed His grace, the Divine Redeemer withdrew
from the multitude and sought retirement. On the side where the sun
first gilds the city with its beams rises a mountain, whose summit He
had oft honoured with His presence when during the solitary night He
spent the hours in fervent prayer.
Gabriel, descending, stands between two perfumed cedars and addresses
Jesus.

Wilt Thou, Lord, here devote the night to prayer,
Or weary, dost thou seek a short repose?
Permit that I for Thine immortal head
A yielding couch prepare. Behold the shrubs
And saplings of the cedar, far and near,
Their balmy foliage already show.
Among the tombs in which Thy prophets rest
The cooling earth yields unmolested moss.

Jesus answered not, but regarded Gabriel with a look of divine
complacency. He went up to the summit, where were the confines of
heaven, and there prayed. Earth rejoiced at the renewal of her beauty
as His voice resounded and penetrated the gates of the deep, but
only He and the Eternal Father knew the whole meaning of the divine
petition. As Jesus arose from prayer, in His face shone sublimity,
love, and resignation.

Now He and the Eternal Father entered on discourse mysterious and
profound, obscure even to immortals; discourse of things which in
future ages should display to man the love of God. A seraph entered
the borders of the celestial world, whose whole extent is surrounded
by suns. No dark planet approaches the refulgent blaze.

There, central of the circumvolving suns,
Heaven, archetype of every blissful sphere,
Orbicular in blazing glory, swims,
And circumfuges through infinitude
In copious streams, the splendour of the spheres.
Harmonious sounds of its revolving motion
Are wafted on the pinions of the winds
To circumambient suns. The potent songs
Of voice and harp celestial intermingle
And seem the animation of the whole.

Up to this sacred way Gabriel ascended, approaching heaven, which, in
the very centre of the assemblage of suns, rises into a vast dome.