Philtre.' Analogy, then, suggests something more than "fruitfulness as the underlying meaning of Aphrodite. Those who suspected the Semitic root to be did not carry their enquiry far enough.2

In this connection we might almost have divined a herbal element in the Cult of Aphrodite from the language of Sappho. Mr. A. B. Cook draws my attention to the opening line of the first fragment of Sappho, where Aphrodite is addressed as

ποικιλόθρον, ἀθάνατ ̓ Αφροδίτα,

and where some controversy, or, at least, divergence of interpretation, has arisen over the meaning of ποικιλόθρονος.

Enmann, in his work on Cyprus and the Origin of the Cult of Aphrodite makes the word to mean that the goddess is seated on the gay sky of Night, she the golden one or the one that dwells in a golden house.

3

Walter Headlam, in his new book of translations, takes the word in the same sense. On the other hand, and with greater probability, Wüstemann' took the word to be derived from @póva moɩkíλa, in

1

Giles, Manual of Comp. Phil., § 223; "venenum, literally 'lovepotion' for uenes-no-m”.

2 Those who wish to follow the matter up may like to have the following references:--

Tümpel, Ares and Aphrodite, p. 680. (Supplement-band XI der Jahrbücher für classische Philologie.) Appodíτn, ein Wort, dessen Semitischen Ursprung schon Völcker (Rhein. Mus., 1883, Ausländische Götterculte bei Homer); Scheiffele (Pauly, Real. Enc. art. Venus) und Schwenck (Myth. iv. 211, 1846) vertheidigt haben, unter Züruckführung auf die Wurzel mit der Bedeutung der Fruchtbarkeit, und mit Recht. Tümpel adds in a note an alternative solution as follows :— Sowie Röth (Geschichte der Philosophie, i. 252 note) und Preller (Gr. Myth. 12, 263), under Berufung auf das Assyrische NT (phöni

אַפְרוּדֶת

kisch mit Artikel) П “die Taube," was vielleicht vorzuziehen wäre, wenn nicht eine Einführung der zahmen weissen Taube der Semiramis in der vorasiatischen Culten der Natur-göttin vor 600 a chr. selbst unwahrscheinlich wäre (Hehn, Culturpfl., 296 f.).

I have not verified these references of Tümpel. It appears to me that the idea of "fruit" or "fruitfulness" is to be understood, as explained above as Fruit of Love, or Love-apple.

3 Enmann, Kypros und der Ursprung des Aphroditekultus in Mem. de l'Académie Imp. des Sciences de S. Pétersbourg, vii serie, tom. xxxiv. No. 13, p. 77.

* Rhein. Mus., xxiii. 238.

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which case Opóva means gay flowers" or or "magic herbs," and the adjective Tokiλó@povos has nothing to do with "a throne": we may refer to the use of Toiкíλa Opóva (" quaint enamelled flowers") in Homer (II. 22, 441) for the original of the Sapphic adjective; but that Opóva may be taken in the sense of "Magic herbs" appears from Theocritos, τά θρόνα ταῦθ ̓ ὑπόμαξον, and Nikander.

From this point of view, Aphrodite Toukiλó@povos is very nearly the same as Aphrodite "Aveia: only the flowers have a medical intention, a Medean quality.

It is admitted that this is somewhat tentative and uncertain; but it is the best solution that has yet presented itself to my mind. As to the meaning of mandragora, I have nothing to add to the attempts that have been made at its explanation.

To sum up, Aphrodite is a personification of the mandrake or love-apple. She holds this in her hand in the form of fruit, and wears it round her waist, or perhaps as an armlet, in the form of a girdle in which the root of the plant is entwined. Whether she had a herb-garden in which the plant was cherished, along with other similar stimulating vegetables, is doubtful; there was at Athens, near the Ilissus, a sanctuary of Aphrodite v Kýπous, but what this means is quite uncertain. Perhaps it was only a municipal name, say "the park". The plant appears to have come down the Levant, in the first instance, probably from Cyprus. As Cyprus is in ancient times a Phoenician island, it is possible that the name of the goddess may be a transfer of a Phoenician name for love-apple. The apple which the goddess holds in her hand in certain great works of art, is a substitute for the primitive apple-of-love.

2 Ther. 493, 936.

1

Idyll. 2, 59.

2

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IDEALS IN THE ENGLISH POETS.'

BY C. H. HERFORD, M.A., Litt.D.,

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE IN THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.

POE

OETRY," said Shelley, "is the expression of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." "Every man," said the great French critic Sainte-Beuve, "has a sleeping poet in his breast." These two sayings may serve to justify, if it need justification, the recourse to the poets at a time of supreme national stress. The poets are even through their poetry akin to us, and the greatest poets are of all the most deeply akin. They waken something in us which habitually sleeps, and this something we recognize, the more surely the greater the poet, as the best in us, something which draws us by a sudden magic out of our common egoisms and our common attachments, and makes us for the time citizens of a realm which is at once real and ideal; the very world which we inhabit, but seen in the light of larger vision and loftier purpose. No doubt, poetry is a house with many mansions, and some of these are idyllic pleasaunces where you rather learn to forget the real world than to see it more clearly; where dreaming eyes look out from magic casements upon faery lands, and idle singers pipe at ease of an empty day. But no great poet remains permanently in these idyllic bowers. You find him sooner or later in the great hall, vividly alive to all that goes on there, to high counsel and heroic emprise, to the memorials of the great past which hang on the walls, the symbolic fire that burns on the hearth. Every country which has given birth to a great poet has a voice in which some national aspiration, or some national need, has become articulate.

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But no nation has a richer treasure of great poets who reflect, sustain, and reanimate its deeper self, than our own country.

1 A Lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on 4 January, 1916.

:

We may distinguish three types of national ideal. In a complete and mature patriotism they will all be found; but, in patriotism as it has commonly been, and still for the most part is, one or other falls short. There is first, the "simple" patriotism of the warrior fighting and dying for his native land, and thinking that true glory. The cry of this patriotism is heard in the first beginnings of all national history, and is heard to the end. It was never more alive than it is in Europe to-day. But as a nation grows in strength and complexity, new problems emerge, for which this primitive patriotic passion offers no solution problems of internal right, the struggle of sovereign and subjects, of privileged orders and the people, of rich and poor; it becomes evident that a nation secure from without may be shattered from within, and then perhaps for the first time fall an easy prey to an external foe. Thus arise more complex ideals of national wellbeing, which may lead men equally devoted to their country along different, even opposite paths; whole-hearted patriots are found on both sides in every civil war, as well as in the normal antagonisms of parties. But these ideals may still ignore everything outside the nation; they may be national in the narrow sense of those who regard the well-being of other nations only as it contributes to the power, wealth, or glory of their own; and it is possible, as we see in Germany to-day, for an ideal of national life to be extraordinarily developed in respect of its own internal organization, and yet on a very low plane in regard to the well-being of other nations. There remains then a third phase of national ideal, which regards the nation as fulfilling its function only when it acts as a member of the community of Man. This third phase, even from a strictly "national " point of view, marks an advance. For just as a man who wrongs his fellow-citizens will be apt to wrong his family, if only by loading them with privileges or luxuries beyond their due, so a nation which is unjust to other nations will be also deeply unjust to itself, if only by stimulating beyond measure those sides of its life, those elements of its strength, which serve only for aggression and expanse.

If we look at the history of these three types of national ideal we find that, while they emerge in different phases of national life, the earlier as a rule persist side by side with the later, like the labourers in the vineyard, and, as there, the latest comer is not the least deserving, though as yet he is apt to receive the least reward. Thus the ele

mentary love of country and readiness to die for it is as strong to-day as in the English country-folks who fought by East Anglian river sides with Danish pirates. The ideals of social justice and order hardly emerge in England before the 14th century; their clash and clamour is still about us on every side to-day. While the ideal of international right, which is to a fully developed nation what the ideal of humanity is to a high-bred man, first became clear and resonant in the age of the French Revolution, and in spite of the appalling rebuff which it has experienced in the present crisis, that ideal is steadily and quietly rooting itself in the best mind of the civilized world.

What, then, has been the part of the poets in relation to these three types of ideal?

I.

Few words are needed here of the elementary but sublime patriotism of the field. War, like Love, touches man where he is greatest and where he is least; the fire and the clay, the hero and the brute. It is the glory of poetry that in its handling of this familiar matter, it helps to liberate us from the obsession of the brute and the clay, and make us one with the hero and the flame. We all of us, as citizens and newspapers readers, treat it as axiomatic: that success is bett e than failure, and coming back from the battle infinitely preferable to falling in it. Yet when Browning tells us that "achievement lacks a gracious somewhat "; or when Wordsworth declares that action is a temporary and limited thing, "the motion of a muscle this way or that," while suffering "opens gracious avenues to infinity ; or when Rupert Brooke, in his noble sonnet, declares that in the peril of death lies the supreme safety,—we thrill with an involuntary assent which, in spite of the protests of our cool reason, obstinately persists. And whether this be every one's experience or not, the poets themselves involuntarily confirm it by the poetic sterility of sheer triumph. The pean is a poor creature compared with tragedy. Even Pindar's of triumph for the winners of chariot races are themselves a kind of triumph over reluctant material. The noblest battle-poetry in Old English is the story, nearly 1000 years old, of one of the rare occasions on which Englishmen have been overpowered by an invading army on their own soil. All fall save two; but their leader before the fight has flung his heroic defiance at the Danish pirates: "Tell

songs