Of every tortured limb—­that now he lies
As if mere sleep possessed him underneath
These interwoven oaks and pines.  Oh cheer,
Divine presenter of the healing rod,
Thy snake, with ardent throat and lulling eye,
Twines his lithe spires around!  I say, much cheer! 
Proceed thou with thy wisest pharmacies! 
And ye, white crowd of woodland sister-nymphs,
Ply, as the sage directs, these buds and leaves
That strew the turf around the twain!  While I 120
Await, in fitting silence, the event.

NOTES

“Artemis Prologizes” represents the goddess Artemis awaiting the revival of the youth Hippolytus, whom she has carried to her woods and given to Asclepios to heal.  It is a fragment meant to introduce an unwritten work and carry on the story related by Euripides in “Hippolytus,” which see.

An epistle
containing the strange medical experience
of Karshish, the Arab physician

1855

Karshish, the picker-up of learning’s crumbs,
The not-incurious in God’s handiwork
(This man’s-flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on earth a space
That puff of vapor from his mouth, man’s soul)
—­To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, 10
Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term—­
And aptest in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such—­
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snakestone—­rarer still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)
And writeth now the twenty-second time. 20

My journeyings were brought to Jericho: 
Thus I resume.  Who studious in our art
Shall count a little labor un-repaid? 
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land. 
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumors of a marching hitherward: 
Some say Vespasian comes, some, his son. 
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:  30
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. 
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead.  Thou laughest here! 
’Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,