Nec Cithara Carentem

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Title:     Nec Cithara Carentem
Author: William Johnson Cory [More Titles by Cory]

The following little Greek lyric occurs in a letter of December 18, 1862, to the Rev. E. D. Stone. "My lines," wrote William Johnson, "are suggested by the death of Thorwaldsen: he died at the age of seventy, imperceptibly, having fallen asleep at a concert. But when I had done them, I remembered Provost Hawtrey's last appearance in public at a music party, where he fell asleep: and so I value my lines as a bit of honour done to him, and it seems odd that I should unintentionally have caught in the second and third lines his characteristic sympathy with the young...."

NEC CITHARA CARENTEM

Guide me with song, kind Muse, to death's dark shade;
Keep me in sweet accord with boy and maid,
Still in fresh blooms of art and truth arrayed.

Bear with old age, blithe child of memory!
Time loves the good; and youth and thou art nigh
To Sophocles and Plato, till they die.

Playmate of freedom, queen of nightingales,
Draw near; thy voice grows faint: my spirit fails
Still with thee, whether sleep or death assails.

[The end]
William Johnson Cory's poem: Nec Cithara Carentem

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