And feel through every sinew run
The vigour of Hippomenes.

O race of love! we all have run
Thy happy course through groves of Spring,
And cared not, when at last we lost,
For life or death, or anything!

There are a few thoughts here requiring a little comment. You know that
the Greek games and athletic contests were held in the fairest season, and
that the contestants were stripped. They were also anointed with oil,
partly to protect the skin against sun and temperature and partly to make
the body more supple. The poet speaks of the young man as being anointed
by the warm wind of Spring, the tropic season of life. It is a very pretty
fancy. What he is really telling us is this:

"There are no more Greek games, but the race of love is still run to-day
as in times gone by; youth is the season, and the atmosphere of youth is
the anointing of the contestant."

But the moral of the piece is its great charm, the poetical statement of a
beautiful and a wonderful fact. In almost every life there is a time when
we care for only one person, and suffer much for that person's sake; yet
in that period we do not care whether we suffer or die, and in after life,
when we look back at those hours of youth, we wonder at the way in which
we then felt. In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still
true; almost everybody must run Atalanta's race and abide by the result.

One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old
acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved