Part 13

_Epicurus._ There is no easy path leading out of life, and few are the easy ones that lie within it. I would adorn and smoothen the declivity, and make my residence as commodious as its situation and dimensions may allow; but principally I would cast under-foot the empty fear of death.

_Ternissa._ Oh, how can you?

_Epicurus._ By many arguments already laid down: then by thinking that some perhaps, in almost every age, have been timid and delicate as Ternissa; and yet have slept soundly, have felt no parent's or friend's tear upon their faces, no throb against their breasts: in short, have been in the calmest of all possible conditions, while those around were in the most deplorable and desperate.

_Ternissa._ It would pain me to die, if it were only at the idea that any one I love would grieve too much for me.

_Epicurus._ Let the loss of our friends be our only grief, and the apprehension of displeasing them our only fear.

_Leontion._ No apostrophes! no interjections! Your argument was unsound; your means futile.

_Epicurus._ Tell me, then, whether the horse of a rider on the road should not be spurred forward if he started at a shadow.

_Leontion._ Yes.

_Epicurus._ I thought so: it would, however, be better to guide him quietly up to it, and to show him that it was one. Death is less than a shadow: it represents nothing, even imperfectly.

_Leontion._ Then at the best what is it? why care about it, think about it, or remind us that it must befall us? Would you take the same trouble, when you see my hair entwined with ivy, to make me remember that, although the leaves are green and pliable, the stem is fragile and rough, and that before I go to bed I shall have many knots and entanglements to extricate? Let me have them; but let me not hear of them until the time is come.

_Epicurus._ I would never think of death as an embarrassment, but as a blessing.

_Ternissa._ How? a blessing?

_Epicurus._ What, if it makes our enemies cease to hate us? what, if it makes our friends love us the more?

_Leontion._ Us? According to your doctrine we shall not exist at all.

_Epicurus._ I spoke of that which is consolatory while we are here, and of that which in plain reason ought to render us contented to stay no longer. You, Leontion, would make others better; and better they certainly will be, when their hostilities languish in an empty field, and their rancour is tired with treading upon dust. The generous affections stir about us at the dreary hour of death, as the blossoms of the Median apple swell and diffuse their fragrance in the cold.

_Ternissa._ I cannot bear to think of passing the Styx, lest Charon should touch me; he is so old and wilful, so cross and ugly.

_Epicurus._ Ternissa! Ternissa! I would accompany you thither, and stand between. Would you not too, Leontion?

_Leontion._ I don't know.

_Ternissa._ Oh, that we could go together!

_Leontion._ Indeed!

_Ternissa._ All three, I mean--I said--or was going to say it. How ill-natured you are, Leontion, to misinterpret me; I could almost cry.

_Leontion._ Do not, do not, Ternissa! Should that tear drop from your eyelash you would look less beautiful.

_Epicurus._ If it is well to conquer a world, it is better to conquer two.

_Ternissa._ That is what Alexander of Macedon wept because he could not accomplish.

_Epicurus._ Ternissa! we three can accomplish it; or any one of us.

_Ternissa._ How? pray!

_Epicurus._ We can conquer this world and the next; for you will have another, and nothing should be refused you.

_Ternissa._ The next by piety: but this, in what manner?

_Epicurus._ By indifference to all who are indifferent to us; by taking joyfully the benefit that comes spontaneously; by wishing no more intensely for what is a hair's-breadth beyond our reach than for a draught of water from the Ganges; and by fearing nothing in another life.

_Ternissa._ This, O Epicurus! is the grand impossibility.

_Epicurus._ Do you believe the gods to be as benevolent and good as you are? or do you not?

_Ternissa._ Much kinder, much better in every way.

_Epicurus._ Would you kill or hurt the sparrow that you keep in your little dressing-room with a string around the leg, because he hath flown where you did not wish him to fly?

_Ternissa._ No! it would be cruel; the string about the leg of so little and weak a creature is enough.

_Epicurus._ You think so; I think so; God thinks so. This I may say confidently; for whenever there is a sentiment in which strict justice and pure benevolence unite, it must be His.

_Ternissa._ O Epicurus! when you speak thus--

_Leontion._ Well, Ternissa, what then?

_Ternissa._ When Epicurus teaches us such sentiments as these, I am grieved that he has not so great an authority with the Athenians as some others have.

_Leontion._ You will grieve more, I suspect, my Ternissa, when he possesses that authority.

_Ternissa._ What will he do?

_Leontion._ Why turn pale? I am not about to answer that he will forget or leave you. No; but the voice comes deepest from the sepulchre, and a great name hath its root in the dead body. If you invited a company to a feast, you might as well place round the table live sheep and oxen and vases of fish and cages of quails, as you would invite a company of friendly hearers to the philosopher who is yet living. One would imagine that the iris of our intellectual eye were lessened by the glory of his presence, and that, like eastern kings, he could be looked at near only when his limbs are stiff, by waxlight, in close curtains.

_Epicurus._ One of whom we know little leaves us a ring or other token of remembrance, and we express a sense of pleasure and of gratitude; one of whom we know nothing writes a book, the contents of which might (if we would let them) have done us more good and might have given us more pleasure, and we revile him for it. The book may do what the legacy cannot; it may be pleasurable and serviceable to others as well as ourselves: we would hinder this too. In fact, all other love is extinguished by self-love: beneficence, humanity, justice, philosophy, sink under it. While we insist that we are looking for Truth, we commit a falsehood. It never was the first object with any one, and with few the second.

Feed unto replenishment your quieter fancies, my sweetest little Ternissa! and let the gods, both youthful and aged, both gentle and boisterous, administer to them hourly on these sunny downs: what can they do better?

_Leontion._ But those feathers, Ternissa, what god's may they be? since you will not pick them up, nor restore them to Calaeis nor to Zethes.

_Ternissa._ I do not think they belong to any god whatever; and shall never be persuaded of it unless Epicurus says it is so.

_Leontion._ O unbelieving creature! do you reason against the immortals?

_Ternissa._ It was yourself who doubted, or appeared to doubt, the flight of Oreithyia. By admitting too much we endanger our religion. Beside, I think I discern some upright stakes at equal distances, and am pretty sure the feathers are tied to them by long strings.

_Epicurus._ You have guessed the truth.

_Ternissa._ Of what use are they there?

_Epicurus._ If you have ever seen the foot of a statue broken off just below the ankle, you have then, Leontion and Ternissa, seen the form of the ground about us. The lower extremities of it are divided into small ridges, as you will perceive if you look around; and these are covered with corn, olives, and vines. At the upper part, where cultivation ceases, and where those sheep and goats are grazing, begins my purchase. The ground rises gradually unto near the summit, where it grows somewhat steep, and terminates in a precipice. Across the middle I have traced a line, denoted by those feathers, from one dingle to the other; the two terminations of my intended garden. The distance is nearly a thousand paces, and the path, perfectly on a level, will be two paces broad, so that I may walk between you; but another could not join us conveniently. From this there will be several circuitous and spiral, leading by the easiest ascent to the summit; and several more, to the road along the cultivation underneath: here will, however, be but one entrance. Among the projecting fragments and the massive stones yet standing of the boundary-wall, which old pomegranates imperfectly defend, and which my neighbour has guarded more effectively against invasion, there are hillocks of crumbling mould, covered in some places with a variety of moss; in others are elevated tufts, or dim labyrinths of eglantine.

_Ternissa._ Where will you place the statues? for undoubtedly you must have some.

_Epicurus._ I will have some models for statues. Pygmalion prayed the gods to give life to the image he adored: I will not pray them to give marble to mine. Never may I lay my wet cheek upon the foot under which is inscribed the name of Leontion or Ternissa!

_Leontion._ Do not make us melancholy; never let us think that the time can come when we shall lose our friends. Glory, literature, philosophy have this advantage over friendship: remove one object from them, and others fill the void; remove one from friendship, one only, and not the earth nor the universality of worlds, no, nor the intellect that soars above and comprehends them, can replace it!

_Epicurus._ Dear Leontion! always amiable, always graceful! How lovely do you now appear to me! what beauteous action accompanied your words!

_Leontion._ I used none whatever.

_Epicurus._ That white arm was then, as it is now, over the shoulder of Ternissa; and her breath imparted a fresh bloom to your cheek, a new music to your voice. No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman. In youth you love one above the others of your sex; in riper age you hate all, more or less, in proportion to similarity of accomplishments and pursuits--which sometimes (I wish it were oftener) are bonds of union to man. In us you more easily pardon faults than excellences in each other. _Your_ tempers are such, my beloved scholars, that even this truth does not ruffle them; and such is your affection, that I look with confidence to its unabated ardour at twenty.

_Leontion._ Oh, then I am to love Ternissa almost fifteen months!

_Ternissa._ And I am destined to survive the loss of it three months above four years!

_Epicurus._ Incomparable creatures! may it be eternal! In loving ye shall follow no example; ye shall step securely over the iron rule laid down for others by the Destinies, and _you_ for ever be Leontion, and _you_ Ternissa.

_Leontion._ Then indeed we should not want statues.

_Ternissa._ But men, who are vainer creatures, would be good for nothing without them: they must be flattered even by the stones.

_Epicurus._ Very true. Neither the higher arts nor the civic virtues can flourish extensively without the statues of illustrious men. But gardens are not the places for them. Sparrows, wooing on the general's truncheon (unless he be such a general as one of ours in the last war), and snails besliming the emblems of the poet, do not remind us worthily of their characters. Porticos are their proper situations, and those the most frequented. Even there they may lose all honour and distinction, whether from the thoughtlessness of magistrates or from the malignity of rivals. Our own city, the least exposed of any to the effects of either, presents us a disheartening example. When the Thebans in their jealousy condemned Pindar to the payment of a fine for having praised the Athenians too highly, our citizens erected a statue of bronze to him.

_Leontion._ Jealousy of Athens made the Thebans fine him; and jealousy of Thebes made the Athenians thus record it.

_Epicurus._ And jealousy of Pindar, I suspect, made some poet persuade the archons to render the distinction a vile and worthless one, by placing his effigy near a king's--one Evagoras of Cyprus.

_Ternissa._ Evagoras, I think I remember to have read in the inscription, was rewarded in this manner for his reception of Conon, defeated by the Lacedemonians.

_Epicurus._ Gratitude was due to him, and some such memorial to record it. External reverence should be paid unsparingly to the higher magistrates of every country who perform their offices exemplarily; yet they are not on this account to be placed in the same degree with men of primary genius. They never exalt the human race, and rarely benefit it; and their benefits are local and transitory, while those of a great writer are universal and eternal.

If the gods did indeed bestow on us a portion of their fire, they seem to have lighted it in sport and left it; the harder task and the nobler is performed by that genius who raises it clear and glowing from its embers, and makes it applicable to the purposes that dignify or delight our nature. I have ever said, 'Reverence the rulers.' Let, then, his image stand; but stand apart from Pindar's. Pallas and Jove! defend me from being carried down the stream of time among a shoal of royalets, and the rootless weeds they are hatched on!

_Ternissa._ So much piety would deserve the exemption, even though your writings did not hold out the decree.

_Leontion._ Child, the compliment is ill turned: if you are ironical, as you must be on the piety of Epicurus, Atticism requires that you should continue to be so, at least to the end of the sentence.

_Ternissa._ Irony is my abhorrence. Epicurus may appear less pious than some others, but I am certain he is more; otherwise the gods would never have given him----

_Leontion._ What? what? let us hear!

_Ternissa._ Leontion!

_Leontion._ Silly girl! Were there any hibiscus or broom growing near at hand, I would send him away and whip you.

_Epicurus._ There is fern, which is better.

_Leontion._ I was not speaking to you: but now you shall have something to answer for yourself. Although you admit no statues in the country, you might at least, methinks, have discovered a retirement with a fountain in it: here I see not even a spring.

_Epicurus._ Fountain I can hardly say there is; but on the left there is a long crevice or chasm, which we have never yet visited, and which we cannot discern until we reach it. This is full of soft mould, very moist, and many high reeds and canes are growing there; and the rock itself too drips with humidity along it, and is covered with more tufted moss and more variegated lichens. This crevice, with its windings and sinuosities, is about four hundred paces long, and in many parts eleven, twelve, thirteen feet wide, but generally six or seven. I shall plant it wholly with lilies of the valley, leaving the irises which occupy the sides as well as the clefts, and also those other flowers of paler purple, from the autumnal cups of which we collect the saffron; and forming a narrow path of such turf as I can find there, or rather following it as it creeps among the bays and hazels and sweet-brier, which had fallen at different times from the summit and are now grown old, with an infinity of primroses at the roots. There are nowhere twenty steps without a projection and a turn, nor in any ten together is the chasm of the same width or figure. Hence the ascent in its windings is easy and imperceptible quite to the termination, where the rocks are somewhat high and precipitous; at the entrance they lose themselves in privet and elder, and you must make your way between them through the canes. Do not you remember where I carried you both across the muddy hollow in the footpath?

_Ternissa._ Leontion does.

_Epicurus._ That place is always wet; not only in this month of Puanepsion,[7] which we are beginning to-day, but in midsummer. The water that causes it comes out a little way above it, but originates from the crevice, which I will cover at top with rose-laurel and mountain-ash, with clematis and vine; and I will intercept the little rill in its wandering, draw it from its concealment, and place it like Bacchus under the protection of the nymphs, who will smile upon it in its marble cradle, which at present I keep at home.

_Ternissa._ Leontion, why do you turn away your face? have the nymphs smiled upon you in it?

_Leontion._ I bathed in it once, if you must know, Ternissa! Why now, Ternissa, why do you turn away yours? have the nymphs frowned upon you for invading their secrets?

_Ternissa._ Epicurus, you are in the right to bring it away from Athens, from under the eye of Pallas: she might be angry.

_Epicurus._ You approve of its removal then, my lovely friend?

_Ternissa._ Mightily. [_Aside._] I wish it may break in pieces on the road.

_Epicurus._ What did you say?

_Ternissa._ I wish it were now on the road, that I might try whether it would hold me--I mean with my clothes on.

_Epicurus._ It would hold you, and one a span longer. I have another in the house; but it is not decorated with fauns and satyrs and foliage, like this.

_Leontion._ I remember putting my hand upon the frightful satyr's head, to leap in: it seems made for the purpose. But the sculptor needed not to place the naiad quite so near--he must have been a very impudent man; it is impossible to look for a moment at such a piece of workmanship.

_Ternissa._ For shame! Leontion!--why, what was it? I do not desire to know.

_Epicurus._ I don't remember it.

_Leontion._ Nor I neither; only the head.

_Epicurus._ I shall place the satyr toward the rock, that you may never see him, Ternissa.

_Ternissa._ Very right; he cannot turn round.

_Leontion._ The poor naiad had done it, in vain.

_Ternissa._ All these labourers will soon finish the plantation, if you superintend them, and are not appointed to some magistrature.

_Epicurus._ Those who govern us are pleased at seeing a philosopher out of the city, and more still at finding in a season of scarcity forty poor citizens, who might become seditious, made happy and quiet by such employment.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition: never to be listened to, and to be listened to always. Aware of these, I devote a large portion of my time and labours to the cultivation of such minds as flourish best in cities, where my garden at the gate, although smaller than this, we find sufficiently capacious. There I secure my listeners; here my thoughts and imaginations have their free natural current, and tarry or wander as the will invites: may it ever be among those dearest to me!--those whose hearts possess the rarest and divinest faculty, of retaining or forgetting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained.

_Leontion._ The whole ground then will be covered with trees and shrubs?

_Epicurus._ There are some protuberances in various parts of the eminence, which you do not perceive till you are upon them or above them. They are almost level at the top, and overgrown with fine grass; for they catch the better soil brought down in small quantities by the rains. These are to be left unplanted: so is the platform under the pinasters, whence there is a prospect of the city, the harbour, the isle of Salamis, and the territory of Megara. 'What then!' cried Sosimenes, 'you would hide from your view my young olives, and the whole length of the new wall I have been building at my own expense between us! and, when you might see at once the whole of Attica, you will hardly see more of it than I could buy.'

_Leontion._ I do not perceive the new wall, for which Sosimenes, no doubt, thinks himself another Pericles.

_Epicurus._ Those old junipers quite conceal it.

_Ternissa._ They look warm and sheltering; but I like the rose-laurels much better: and what a thicket of them here is!

_Epicurus._ Leaving all the larger, I shall remove many thousands of them; enough to border the greater part of the walk, intermixed with roses.

There is an infinity of other plants and flowers, or weeds as Sosimenes calls them, of which he has cleared his oliveyard, and which I shall adopt. Twenty of his slaves came in yesterday, laden with hyacinths and narcissi, anemones and jonquils. 'The curses of our vineyards,' cried he, 'and good neither for man nor beast. I have another estate infested with lilies of the valley: I should not wonder if you accepted these too.'

'And with thanks,' answered I.

The whole of his remark I could not collect: he turned aside, and (I believe) prayed. I only heard 'Pallas'--'Father'--'sound mind'--'inoffensive man'--'good neighbour'. As we walked together I perceived him looking grave, and I could not resist my inclination to smile as I turned my eyes toward him. He observed it, at first with unconcern, but by degrees some doubts arose within him, and he said, 'Epicurus, you have been throwing away no less than half a talent on this sorry piece of mountain, and I fear you are about to waste as much in labour: for nothing was ever so terrible as the price we are obliged to pay the workman, since the conquest of Persia and the increase of luxury in our city. Under three obols none will do his day's work. But what, in the name of all the deities, could induce you to plant those roots, which other people dig up and throw away?'

'I have been doing,' said I, 'the same thing my whole life through, Sosimenes!'

'How!' cried he; 'I never knew that.'

'Those very doctrines,' added I, 'which others hate and extirpate, I inculcate and cherish. They bring no riches, and therefore are thought to bring no advantage; to me, they appear the more advantageous for that reason. They give us immediately what we solicit through the means of wealth. We toil for the wealth first; and then it remains to be proved whether we can purchase with it what we look for. Now, to carry our money to the market, and not to find in the market our money's worth, is great vexation; yet much greater has already preceded, in running up and down for it among so many competitors, and through so many thieves.'

After a while he rejoined, 'You really, then, have not overreached me?'

'In what, my friend?' said I.

'These roots,' he answered, 'may perhaps be good and saleable for some purpose. Shall you send them into Persia? or whither?'

'Sosimenes, I shall make love-potions of the flowers.'

_Leontion._ O Epicurus! should it ever be known in Athens that they are good for this, you will not have, with all your fences of prunes and pomegranates, and precipices with brier upon them, a single root left under ground after the month of Elaphebolion.[8]

_Epicurus._ It is not every one that knows the preparation.

_Leontion._ Everybody will try it.

_Epicurus._ And you, too, Ternissa?

_Ternissa._ Will you teach me?

_Epicurus._ This, and anything else I know. We must walk together when they are in flower.

_Ternissa._ And can you teach me, then?

_Epicurus._ I teach by degrees.