The title is "A New Year's Day." Our planet runs through liquid space, And sweeps us with her in the race; And wrinkles gather on my face, And Hebe bloom on thine: Our sun with his encircling spheres Around the central sun careers; And unto thee with mustering years Come hopes which I resign.
'Twere sweet for me to keep thee still Reclining halfway up the hill; But time will not obey the will, And onward thou must climb: 'Twere sweet to pause on this descent, To wait for thee and pitch my tent, But march I must with shoulders bent, Yet further from my prime.
_I shall not tread thy battlefield, Nor see the blazon on thy shield; Take thou the sword I could not wield, And leave me, and forget.
Be fairer, braver, more admired; So win what feeble hearts desired; Then leave thine arms, when thou art tired, To some one nobler yet._ How beautiful this is, and how profoundly sad! I shall return to the personal poetry of Cory later on, but I want now to give you some examples of his Greek work.

Perhaps the best of this is little more than a rendering of Greek into English; some of the work is pure translation.

But it is the translation of a very great master, the perfect rendering of Greek feeling as well as of Greek thought.

Here is an example of pure translation: They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
What are "thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales"?
They are the songs which the dear dead poet made, still sung in his native country, though his body was burned to ashes long ago--has been changed into a mere handful of grey ashes, which, doubtless, have been placed in an urn, as is done with such ashes to-day in Japan.

Death takes away all things from man, but not his poems, his songs, the beautiful thoughts which he puts into musical verse.
These will always be heard like nightingales.