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.  The fourth line in the first stanza contains an idiom which may not be familiar to you.  It means only that the two friends talked all day until the sun set in the West, and still talked on after that.  Tennyson has used the same Greek thought in a verse of his poem, “A Dream of Fair Women,” where Cleopatra says,

  “We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.”

The Greek author of the above poem was the great poet Callimachus, and the English translator does not think it necessary even to give the name, as he wrote only for folk well acquainted with the classics.  He has another short translation which he accompanies with the original Greek text; it is very pretty, but of an entirely different kind, a kind that may remind you of some Japanese poems.  It is only about a cicada and a peasant girl, and perhaps it is twenty-four or twenty-five hundred years old.

  A dry cicale chirps to a lass making hay,
  “Why creak’st thou, Tithonus?” quoth she.  “I don’t play;
  It doubles my toil, your importunate lay,
  I’ve earned a sweet pillow, lo!  Hesper is nigh;
  I clasp a good wisp and in fragrance I lie;
  But thou art unwearied, and empty, and dry.”

How very human this little thing is—­how actually it brings before us the figure of the girl, who must have become dust some time between two and three thousand years ago!  She is working hard in the field, and the constant singing of the insect prompts her to make a comical protest.  “Oh, Tithonus, what are you making that creaking noise for?  You old dry thing, I have no time to play with you, or to idle in any way, but you do nothing but complain.  Why don’t you work, as I do?  Soon I shall have leave to sleep, because I have worked well.  There is the evening star, and I shall have a good bed of hay, sweet-smelling fresh hay, to lie upon.  How well I shall sleep.  But you, you idle noisy thing, you do not deserve to sleep.  You have done nothing to tire you.  And you are empty, dry