“Very often some striking poetical turn given to a subject makes it, all at once, clear to our comprehension, even when long and learned disquisitions have failed; and I am acquainted with such an one, written by an anonymous author, and which may please you—­and you too, Aristarchus.  It epitomizes very happily the subject of our discussion.  The lines run as follows: 

                   “Behold, the puny Child of Man
                    Sits by Time’s boundless sea,
                    And gathers in his feeble hand
                    Drops of Eternity.

“He overhears some broken words
Of whispered mystery
He writes them in a tiny book
And calls it ‘History!’

“We owe these verses to an accomplished friend; another has amplified the idea by adding the two that follow: 

                   “If indeed the puny Child of Man
                    Had not gathered drops from that wide sea,
                    Those small deeds that fill his little span
                    Had been lost in dumb Eternity.

“Feeble is his hand, and yet it dare
Seize some drops of that perennial stream;
As they fall they catch a transient gleam—­
Lo!  Eternity is mirrored there!

“What are we all but puny children?  And those of us who gather up the drops surely deserve our esteem no less than those who spend their lives on the shore of that great ocean in mere play and strife—­”

“And love,” threw in Eulaeus in a low voice, as he glanced towards Publius.

“Your poet’s verses are pretty and appropriate,” Aristarchus now said, “and I am very happy to find myself compared to the children who catch the falling drops.  There was a time—­which came to an end, alas! with the great Aristotle—­when there were men among the Greeks, who fed the ocean of which you speak with new tributaries; for the gods had bestowed on them the power of opening new sources, like the magician Moses, of whom Onias, the Jew, was lately telling us, and whose history I have read in the sacred books of the Hebrews.  He, it is true—­Moses I mean—­only struck water from the rock for the use of the body, while to our philosophers and poets we owe inexhaustible springs to refresh the mind and soul.  The time is now past which gave birth to such divine and creative spirits; as your majesties’ forefathers recognized full well when they founded the Museum of Alexandria and the Library, of which I am one of the guardians, and which I may boast of having completed with your gracious assistance.  When Ptolemy Soter first created the Museum in Alexandria the works of the greatest period could receive no additions in the form of modern writings of the highest class; but he set us—­children of man, gathering the drops—­the task of collecting and of sifting them, of eliminating errors in them—­and I think we have proved ourselves equal to this task.