From Leonard Bacon’s The Mound Builders (in Guinea-Fowl and Other Poultry).

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In a world of mighty men he moved twice-born.
They made more fair for him the existing day.
He never felt amid the alien corn
As if they were two thousand years away.
For him they emptied an abundant horn,
And to his spirit nobly said their say
In glittering prose, or verse like breakers rolling,
The very essence of the soul controlling:

Horace, Catullus, whose ecstatic phrase
Burns on for ever in a generous brain,
And Juvenal, whose line like lightning plays,
Tined with a wrath that is not wholly sane,
Or he whom Dante did not dare to praise,
And who the Italian’s praises might disdain,
Had the noblest nature that was ever born
Known the sublime infirmity of scorn.

Or the class-room hushed, as he discoursed of Homer,
Seeing in Ithaca the great bow bend,
Or the narrow galley ride the wine-dark comber,
And Achilles mourning for his fated friend.
For learning was to him not a misnomer
For deadly drudgery without an end,
A dull, interminable, unseemly traffic,
The robbery of graveyards paleographic.
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