Links and Notes

I meant to mention it; yesterday Siris finished its sixth year.

* Stabilize the debt. An online simulator that allows you to play around with various proposals that have made for making the U.S. federal debt more manageable in order to see if you can bring the U.S. debt down to an estimated 60% of the GDP by 2018. It's interesting to try out different alternatives, and things often look somewhat different in final overview than they do when you take things one by one.

* A castle is being built in France using only methods available to the 13th century. (ht)

* Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. (ht)

* Soviet illustrations of Tolkien's The Hobbit. The Russian fairy-tale style is charming, and fits the tale quite well. (ht)

* Moon Zoo is a site where you can assist lunar researchers in their survey of craters on the moon. I love it when scientists do this. This sort of thing was advocated in the nineteenth century by the likes of John Herschel and William Whewell (Herschel recommended a low-tech version of precisely this sort of program for meteorology); there still were dreams of a world in which science was done not by scattered individuals but by societies, nations, civilizations. This is not what we actually got; for instance, by the end of the nineteenth century brilliant amateur natural historians like Beatrix Potter were being steadily frozen out of increasingly specialized scientific circles. One advantage of our age is that the increasing ease with which one can gather data on truly massive scales has forced sciences to reopen projects of this kind.

* Tim O'Neill reviews Agora.

* Christopher Donohue discusses Fustel de Coulanges. I'm reminded of an anecdote from Duhem's German Science, in which students were amused that whenever they would make a claim about some historical matter, Fustel de Coulanges would reply, "Do you have a text to support that?"

* Jimmy Akin discusses the Old Brass Wagon and how people dance in a culture that frowns on dance.

* Rod Bennett on Justin Martyr.

* Stephen Barr discusses neutrinos.

* Charles Lwanda and the Ugandan martyrs.

I will be busy attending a cousin's wedding this weekend, so there will probably be no more posts until Mondary or Tuesday.

Corpus Christi

Bread is broken on the table;
Cup now overflows with wine;
by this word the Word our Savior
is the substance of the sign.

Adam's flesh from fleshly Adam
freed from sinful flesh once more:
we are made, by blood and body,
flesh and blood with Christ our Lord.

Speak, my tongue, of His scourged body,
blessed and broken for our race.
This so priceless blood now flowing
pays our price and grants us grace.

Sing, my voice, the song of angels
wondering at God-filled tomb,
which, with side-sprung water flowing,
compassed us to be our womb.

Love, my heart, the changeless ancient
who descends from God above,
made a babe and passion's patient;
He is God, for God is Love.

Trust, my soul, in Truth most holy:
Truth is true and does not lie.
Free from lie, from lies He freed us;
see the sign Truth truly died!

Hope, my spirit in your Savior,
who is life, in dying lives,
who is given by the Father
as this bread that true life gives.

Shout, my sisters; shout, my brothers!
From the housetops make it known.
Tell the tale on every mountain;
own this well: you are His own!

Wounds of the Sad Uncomprehending Dark

Still Falls the Rain
by Edith Sitwell

The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.

Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:

Still falls the Rain

In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain---
Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune---
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain---
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

You can hear Dame Edith read this poem about the Blitz at Poetry Archive. Benjamin Britten also did a famous musical setting for the piece; you can find Part One and Part Two at YouTube. (I don't think Britten's piece gets either the rhythm or the mood of the poem right.)

Every F is G, with Fewer G's than F's

I notice at Dale Tuggy's "Trinities" blog that the claim came up that "if every F is a G, then there can’t be fewer Gs than Fs." This claim goes back to Richard Cartwright's old paper on the Trinity, and is often presented as if it were self-evident.

It's notable, though, that it's not difficult to find apparent counterexamples. Suppose I have a list:

1. Mary Ann Evans
2. Samuel Clemens
3. George Eliot
4. Mark Twain

If you ask me how many things are itemized on my list, it's entirely reasonable to say that there are 4 things itemized on my list. I can also say, "Everything itemized on my list is a real person." But how many real people are on my list? Only two; each one shows up twice. The F's here are things itemized on my list; the G's are real people; every F is a G; but there are fewer G's than F's.

Let's take an example that's closer to home. On a typical statistics counter for a webpage or blog, there is a counter for what are called "Unique Visitors." Unique visitors are counted by determining what number of visits (which are different from the number of views) has been made by way of that particular computer. Now it's true that every unique visitor is someone visiting your site, at least, if one sets aside bots (which many statistics counters do). But the number of unique visitors has no particular relation to the number of people visiting your site; if a single person visits your site from two different computers, they will be counted as two unique visitors. On the other hand several different people using the same computer to visit your site will register as the same unique visitor. The former characteristic, the ability of one person to be more than one unique visitor, is the one of interest here. Setting aside bots again, every unique visitor is a person visiting your website. But you cannot conclude from this that there can't be fewer F's than G's.

When faced by this people will usually reply by saying something like, "Well, look, the four things on the list are really not people; they are names. And the unique visitors are really not people; they are identifiable computers." This is an attempt to remove all intensional and modal factors in counting; but it needs to be noted that this is already a restriction of the original claim. In practice we do not treat counting in purely extensional terms; how we describe or know things is important. I know my list counts people; but I may not know that it fails to count each person uniquely. And it is entirely possible, as with the unique visitor count, to count things in ways that do not count them uniquely. Indeed, there are many cases where one might do this quite deliberately. Setting aside a few odd cases, every airline passenger is a person, but the same person can get counted by airlines as different passengers. This makes a lot of sense, because the thing that primarily matters for airlines is not the number of people but the number of passengers.

Thus the original claim really boils down to the claim, "When every uniquely identifiable and separate F is a uniquely identifiable and separate G, then there cannot be fewer G's than F's." Every dog is a mammal; but, more than this, this can be glossed in straightforwardly extensional terms: each separate, individual thing that is a dog is exactly the same as a separate, individual thing that is a mammal. Given this, there cannot be fewer mammals in a room than there are dogs, because each separate dog will count as a separate mammal. In such a case the claim really is self-evident. But once we are in territory where different ways of counting have different intensional and modal features, it not only is no longer self-evident; it's provably false. The claim can only be saved by restricting it to cases where there is either only one way of counting or, if there are several ways of counting, if their results are directly convertible into each other (i.e., their results map onto each other perfectly). But there are plenty of areas of life where we are interested in how ways of counting that are not directly convertible relate to each other.

St. Justin, Martyr

Around about 90 BC Antiochus of Ascalon reacted against the skepticisms of the New Academy by founding the Old Academy. The name 'Old Academy' and the peculiarity of its being newer than the New Academy is quite deliberate; Antiochus regarded it as intolerable that the School of Plato was so very un-Platonic, and thus advocated a return to Plato. Such reform movements are never merely reactionary; rediscovery in the midst of opposition to one's project is inevitably innovative. The new movement drew from Peripatetic and Stoic sources in order to defend itself, attack Academic skepticism, and form alliances with other positions. Like any reform movement, it simultaneously identified itself with a past purity -- the Old Academy of Plato and his first three successors -- and used this as a framework for developing new solutions to more contemporary problems. The resulting project was Platonic and Peripatetic and Stoic, which while eclectic is less eclectic than it is usually made to sound, because returning to the root made it possible to find genuine commonalities. The Peripatetics were an early offshoot of the Academy, through Aristotle; and many of the ideas we associate with Stoicism first found their basic form in the successors of Plato.

We don't have much on Antiochus, although what we do have suggests that he was better at articulating a vision than developing it. But the challenge was taking up by many others over the next several centuries, the most important of whom were Eudorus of Alexandria, Plutarch of Chaeronea (the best known of the three), and Philo of Alexandria. The third of these is especially intriguing and important, for Philo was a Jew (hence the other name he is known by, Philo Judaeus). Philo's integration of Jewish belief and Middle Platonism would set the stage for centuries to come. For Christianity partly grew up in the crucible of Middle Platonism, of the Philonic type.

There are parts of Paul's letters and the Epistle to the Hebrews in which one might see such influence, but the influence is most marked in the Gospel of John (and it is notable that Hellenistic Jews come up explicitly a couple of times in the book, e.g., 7:35, 12:20ff). One of the most important means Philo had used to integrate Jewish and Greek thought was his developed account of the Logos. Logos, reason or word, was a common term in Greek philosophy, and was associated with the divine; it also occurs quite often in the Septuagint to refer to God's word. On Philo's account the Logos is a power in God; it is the divine Mind containing the Platonic Ideas and is active and effective as God's Word:

[I]n the one living and true God there were two supreme and primary powers, Goodness [or Creative Power] and Authority [or Regent Power]; and that by his Goodness he had created every thing; and that by his Authority he governed all that he had created; and that the third thing which was between the two, and had the effect of bringing them together was the Logos, for it was owing to the Logos that God was both a ruler and good.(Cher 1.27-28, qtd here)

It's the general Philonic idea of divine Logos that is in the background of the opening words of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Logos
and the Logos was with God
and the Logos was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
Through him all things were made;
without him nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life,
and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness does not comprehend it.

And, he continues, the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. Thus Christianity from its early days built on the vocabulary, or, rather, vocabularies, of Middle Platonism.

It is then unsurprising that many Middle Platonists found Christianity to have its attractions, and this brings us to the saint whose feast-day it is, Justin the Martyr. For Justin was born to a pagan Greek family in Samaria (as he calls himself, he was "Justin, the son of Priscos, son of Baccheios, of Flavia Neapolis, in Palestinian Syria") in the early second century. He became a philosopher of Middle Platonist stamp, drawing now from Stoicism, now from Pythagoreanism, now from Aristotelianism, eventually making his way to Ephesus. He converted at some point to Christianity, in part, it seems, because he found them to be less morally objectionable than people in other schools of philosophy (particularly in terms of their courage and charity to others); and much of the argument in his works is that philosophy, especially as conceived by Socrates and Plato, finds its natural culmination in Christianity. Both philosophy and Christianity share in their love of Logos, but with Christians holding that Logos so reciprocated as to become man; he explicitly mentions Socrates as a proto-Christian in his argument that it is unjust for the Empire to persecute Christians:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Logos of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without Logos, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived according to Logos.

We don't know the full details of how it is that Justin became a martyr; certainly he was never hesitant to insist in public that Christians were right, although he is largely quite irenic about pagans. There is some indication that in his wandering about first Ephesus and then Rome engaging in philosophical arguments he may have made enemies; he explicitly says at one point that he expected it to happen, and even named one Crescens, a Cynic philosopher, as a likely person to cause problems for him. Thus Crescens perhaps did get to him, or someone like Crescens, although we don't really know for sure. We do know that he was tried with six others in a standard trial under the prefect Rusticus during the persecutions under Marcus Aurelius and was put to death. It is perhaps an irony that the parataxis, the obstinacy, that the philosopher Marcus Aurelius loathed in Christians, the philosopher Justin exalted as showing the paradoxical summit of a good life, a life that put truth before life. The emperor probably never knew the teacher, but for different reasons they would both have considered Justin's death appropriate to his views.

Justin lived in the evening of Middle Platonism. In the very next century Plotinus for the pagans and Origen for the Christians will begin to push for major innovations, and the Neoplatonic phase of philosophy will begin. Much of Middle Platonism will survive, but the doctrines will become less eclectic, more systematically integrated, at times reinterpreted; philosophical criticism of other positions will become more developed and thorough; and the questions about the relation between philosophy and religion will become a bit more complicated than they were in the days of Justin and Clement of Alexandria and others of their kind who took Christianity to be divine philosophy. But the role of Middle Platonism in early Christian life, as witnessed by people like Justin, would have significant consequences for centuries to come.

Surf of Fire

Love in a Hut
by Roy Campbell

Maternal Earth stirs redly from beneath
Her blue sea-blanket and her quilt of sky,
A giant Anadyomene from the sheath
And chrysalis of darkness; till we spy
Her vast barbaric haunches, furred with trees,
Stretched on the continents, and see her hair
Combed in a surf of fire along the breeze
To curl about the dim sierras, where
Faint snow-peaks catch the sun's far-swivelled beams:
And, tinder to his rays, the mountain-streams
Kindle, and volleying with a thunderstroke
Out of their roaring gullies, burst in smoke
To shred themselves as fine as women's hair,
And hoop gay rainbows on the sunlit air.

Three Poem Re-Drafts

Venus Anadyomene

Blood and foam battle,
intermingle, intermix,
roll together, sea-compounded:
wave, god, death.
Beauty blooms on seacrest,
ascends from byssal womb,
natal-naked glory
on fierce and naked tide:
Rises Dione over wave,
foam-skinned, living blush,
golden-haired, guiltless-white
upon a blood-red sea.

Parmenides' Vision

Rapt, thrown upward, undone,
Ecstatic sight seeking vital clue,
I journeyed on a well-known path.
She came:
Great gold-winged goddess, chariot-driving,
More splendid than any Cyprian glory
On sands manifested to a mortal man.
She came,
Speaking to my dreaming ears:
Two are the ways before you;
One is true, one appears.
Both are gated, and above the first
God-like message shines forth
Like the words above the Delphic road,
Holy:
What is, is, and is not what is not.
Upon that path journey, said she,
The way of truth and not of seeming;
What seems will pass, the real remains;
Wisdom's lover finds relief
In what is.
Then was that fleeting, swift-footed, golden goddess
Gone, and I amazed.

In All the World Are None for Me

In all the world are none for me.
Lonely whispers from the sea
like shadows slink out on the sly
beyond the corner of my eye:
words cannot capture weary heart,
nor force, nor faith, nor artless art,
and always mocking almost-mights
haunt the dark and lonely nights,
long-broken idols made of sand
that whisper of the promised land,
gnat-like nothings made of air,
pithless deserts, dry and bare,
and one small impulse deep inside,
stubborn in its inborn pride,
to seek, to quest and never stay,
till love is found, or judgment day.

Web of Years

The Loom of the Years
by Alfred Noyes

In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,
In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mould
To colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold:
Light and scent and music die and are born again
In the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain.

The hound, the fawn and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo,
We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through,
One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fears
As it goes thro' the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The crosiers of the fern, and the crown, the crown of the rose,
Pass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close,
Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars,
Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars.

Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight?
Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro' the warp of the night!
Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears,
As It comes thro' the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

O, woven in one wide Loom thro' the throbbing weft of the whole,
One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul,
The leaf on the winds of autumn, the bird in its hour to die,
The heart in its muffled anguish, the sea in its mournful cry,

One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon,
One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon,
One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

Feast of Holy Trinity VII

All then that the Son and the Spirit have is from the Father, even their very being: and unless the Father is, neither the Son nor the Spirit is. And unless the Father possesses a certain attribute, neither the Son nor the Spirit possesses it: and through the Father, that is, because of the Father's existence, the Son and the Spirit exist, and through the Father, that is, because of the Father having the qualities, the Son and the Spirit have all their qualities, those of being unbegotten, and of birth and of procession being excepted. For in these hypostatic or personal properties alone do the three holy subsistences differ from each other, being indivisibly divided not by essence but by the distinguishing mark of their proper and peculiar subsistence.

St. John Damascene, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I, Chapter VIII

Feast of Holy Trinity VI

[I]f we bear the image of the Word humiliated upon earth, and if we follow the impulses of the Holy Ghost, this union of our mind with the Word of the Father,and with the love of the Father and the Son, will be reestablished and made indelible. We shall be like God if we are like the God-man. Finally, God will be entirely in us, and we in Him in a way much more perfect than that by which we must be in Him and He in us that we might subsist.

Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth 3.2.6 (LO 235).

Feast of Holy Trinity V

There are two reason why the knowledge of the divine persons was necessary for us. It was necessary for the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made all things by His Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in Him there is a procession of love, we show that God produced creatures not because He needed them, nor because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness. So Moses, when he had said, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," subjoined, "God said, Let there be light," to manifest the divine Word; and then said, "God saw the light that it was good," to show proof of the divine love. The same is also found in the other works of creation. In another way, and chiefly, that we may think rightly concerning the salvation of the human race, accomplished by the Incarnate Son, and by the gift of the Holy Ghost.

St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 1.32.1 ad 3

Feast of Holy Trinity IV

In the administration of all things there is authority to establish, law to direct, and justice to execute. There is first the source of all perfection, or fons deitatis, secondly the supreme Reason, order, or LOGOS, and lastly the Spirit which quickens and inspires. We are sprung from the father, irradiated or enlightened by the son, and moved by the spirit. Certainly, that there is father, son, and spirit; that these bear analogy to the sun, light, and heat; and are otherwise expressed by the terms, principle, mind, and soul; by one or TO HEN, intellect, and life; by good, word, and love; and that generation was not attributed to the second hypostasis, the NOUS or LOGOS, in respect of time, but only in respect of origin and order, as an eternal necessary emanation; these are the express tenets of Platonists, Pythagoreans, Egyptians, and Chaldaeans.

George Berkeley, Siris, section 362.

Feast of Holy Trinity III

To this it must be said, that in eight ways the plurality of the Persons is insinuated to us in Scripture. In the first way by signification in the last (chapter) of Matthew (Mt 28:19): In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In the second way by consignification at the beginning of Genesis, where we have "God", the Hebrews have "Elohim", which is the nominative plural of the singular "El". In the third way by supposition, as when it is said God begot God in the eighth (chapter) of Proverbs: Before all the hills the Lord has generated Me (Pr 8:25). In the fourth way by appropriation, as so (Gn 1:1): In the beginning God created etc. For there "God" is appropriated to the Father and The Beginning to the Son. In the fifth way by iteration, as in the sixth (chapter) of Isaiah (Is 6:3): Holy, Holy, Holy the Lord God Sabaoth. In the sixth way by the order of words, (as in) the Psalm (Ps 67:6-7): May God bless us, our God, may God bless us. In the seventh way by connotation in the act of mission, as when there is said in the fourth (chapter) to the Galatians (Gal 4:4): God sent etc. In the eighth way by apparition, just as the three men appeared to Abraham in the eighteenth (chapter) of Genesis.

St. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, bk. 1 d. 2 dub 8

Feast of Holy Trinity II

And here, let it be observed, that we have a sort of figure or intimation of the sacred Mystery of the Trinity in Unity even in what has been now said concerning the Divine Attributes. For as the Attributes of God are many in one mode of speaking, yet all One in God; so, too, there are Three Divine Persons, yet these Three are One. Let it not be for an instant supposed that I am paralleling the two cases, which is the Sabellian heresy; but I use the one in illustration of the other; and, in way of illustration, I observe as follows: When we speak of God as Wisdom, or as Love, we mean to say that He is Wisdom, and that He is Love; that He is each separately and wholly, yet not that Wisdom is the same as Love, though He is both at once. Wisdom and Love stand for ideas quite distinct from each other, and not to be confused, though they are united in Him. In all He is and all He does, He is Wisdom and He is Love; yet it is both true that He is but One, and without qualities, and withal true again that Love is not Wisdom. Again, as God is Wisdom or Love, so is Wisdom or Love in and with God, and whatever God is. Is God eternal? so is His wisdom. Is He unchangeable? so is His wisdom. Is He uncreate, infinite, almighty, all-holy? His wisdom has these characteristics also. Since God has no parts or passions, whatever is really of or from God, is all that He is. If there is confusion of language here, and an apparent play upon words, this arises from our incapacity in comprehension and expression.

Ven. (in a few months to be Bl.!) John Henry Newman, "The Mystery of the Holy Trinity"

Feast of Holy Trinity

Why is the mystery of the Holy Trinity shown forth when man is formed and also when he is formed anew? Not just because man is, on earth, the only initiate into this mystery and the only creature to venerate it, but because he alone is in the image of the Trinity. Sensible and irrational animals have only a living spirit, which is incapable of independent existence, and is completely devoid of mind or reason. But the perfectly suprasensible angels and archangels, as they are intelligent and rational, have a mind and reason, but no quickening spirit, since they also lack bodies which would need to be animated by such a spirit. Man is the only creature who, in the image of the tri-hypostatic Being, has a mind, reason, and a spirit which gives life to his body, inasmuch as he also has a body which needs to be infused with life. When our nature was re-made in the Jordan, the most sublime and all-accomplishing Trinity was made manifest, as the archetype of the image in our soul.

St. Gregory Palamas, Homily Sixty, Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies. Mount Thabor Publishing (2009) p. 495.

The Glad Lilies Rocked in the Ripples that Rolled

The Old Swimmin'-Hole
by James Whitcomb Riley

OH! the old swimmin'-hole! whare the crick so still and deep
Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep,
And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below
Sounded like the laugh of something we onc't ust to know
Before we could remember anything but the eyes
Of the angels lookin' out as we left Paradise;
But the merry days of youth is beyond our controle,
And it's hard to part ferever with the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the happy days of yore,
When I ust to lean above it on the old sickamore,
Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide
That gazed back at me so gay and glorified,
It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress
My shadder smilin' up at me with sich tenderness.
But them days is past and gone, and old Time's tuck his toll
From the old man come back to the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the long, lazy-days
When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways,
How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane,
Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane
You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole
They was lots o'fun on hands at the old swimmin'-hole.
But the lost joys is past! Let your tears in sorrow roll
Like the rain that ust to dapple up the old swimmin'-hole.

There the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall,
And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all;
And it mottled the worter with amber and gold
Tel the glad lilies rocked in the ripples that rolled;
And the snake-feeder's four gauzy wings fluttered by
Like the ghost of a daisy dropped out of the sky,
Or a wounded apple-blossom in the breeze's controle
As it cut acrost some orchurd to'rds the old swimmin'-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! When I last saw the place,
The scene was all changed, like the change in my face;
The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot
Whare the old divin'-log lays sunk and fergot.
And I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be -
But never again will theyr shade shelter me!
And I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,
And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin'-hole.