Nor, without cause, he grasps those barbed darts, | Who taught this vast machine its steadfast laws,
The Cretan quiver o'er his shoulder cast; That first, eternal, universal cause;
Ere we suspect a foe, he strikes our hearts; Search to what regions yonder star retires,
That monthly waning hides her paly fires,
And whence, anew revived, with silver light,
Relumes her crescent-orb to cheer the dreary
night:
And those inflicted wounds for ever last. In me are fix'd those arrows,-in my breast; But, şure, his wings are shorn, the boy remains; For never takes he flight, nor knows he rest; Still, still I feel him warring through my veins. In these scorch'd vitals dost thou joy to dwell? Oh shame! to others let thine arrows flee; Let veins, untouch'd, with all thy venom swell;
Not me thou torturest, but the shade of me. Destroy me;-who shall then describe the fair? This my light Muse to thee high glory brings; When the nymphs' tapering fingers, flowing hair, And eyes of jet, and gliding feet, she sings.
LONG as of youth the joyous hours remain,
Me may Castalia's sweet recess detain,
Fast by the umbrageous vale lull'd to repose,
Where Aganippe warbles as it flows;
Or roused by sprightly sounds from out the trance, I'd in the ring knit hands, and join the Muses' dance.
Give me to send the laughing bowl around,
My soul in Bacchus' pleasing fetters bound;
Let on this head unfading flowers reside,
There bloom the vernal rose's earliest pride;
And when, our flames commission'd to destroy,
Age steps 'twixt Love and me, and intercepts
the joy;
When my changed head these locks no more shall know,
And all its jetty honours turn to snow;
Then let me rightly speak of Nature's ways;
To Providence, to Him my thoughts I'd raise
How rising winds the face of ocean sweep,
Where lie the eternal fountains of the deep,
And whence the cloudy magazines maintain
Their wintry war, or pour the autumnal rain.
How flames perhaps, with dire confusion hurl'd,
Shall sink this beauteous fabric of the world;
What colours paint the vivid arch of Jove;
What wondrous force the solid earth can move.
When Pindus' self approaching ruin dreads,
Shakes all his pines, and bows his hundred heads;
Why does yon orb, so exquisitely bright,
Obscure his radiance in a short-lived night;
Whence the Seven-Sisters' congregated fires,
And what Bootes' lazy waggon tires;
How the rude surge its sandy bounds control;
Who measured out the year, and bade the sea-
If realms beneath those fabled torments know,
Pangs without respite, fires that ever glow,
Earth's monster brood stretch'd on their iron bed,
The hissing terrors round Alecto's head,
Scarce to nine acres Tityus' bulk confined,
The triple dog that scares the shadowy kind,
All angry heaven inflicts, or hell can feel,
The pendant rock, Ixion's whirling wheel,
Famine at feasts, or thirst amid the stream;
Or are our fears the enthusiasts' empty dream,
And all the scenes that hurt the grave's repose
But pictured horror and poetic woes?
These soft inglorious joys my hours engage;
Be love my youth's pursuit, and science crown
my age.
[Born 43, B. C.,-Died 16, A. D.]
PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO was born of an honourable family at Sulmo, a town in the territory of the Peligni, in Italy. He was educated at Rome and Athens, under the best masters; acquired some reputation by his eloquence at the bar; and served a campaign under Marcus Varro, in Asia. His earliest inclinations had been always for poetry; but this was a luxury which he was scarcely at liberty to indulge, until after the deaths of his father and elder brother, from the latter of whom he inherited an ample fortune.
*To deter him from it, his father was in the habit of
After many years spent at Rome-in the enjoyment of some of its best society, and in the practice of most of its worst vices-he by some unascertained accident or offence, drew down on himself the displeasure of the emperor, and was banished to Tomi, a town of Pontus, on the Euxine sea, where, notwithstanding his own pathetic epistles, and the unceasing intercession of his friends, he was doomed to linger out his days.-He died in the eighth year of his exile; in the fifty-ninth of his age; and in the sixteenth of the Christian era. Ovid had three wives; he was divorced from the two first, but seems to
decaiming on the unprofitableness of the study, and ge- have entertained something like tenderness for neral poverty of its professors
Sæpe Pater dixit, "Studium quid inutile tentas?
Mæonides nullas ipse reliquit opes."-Trist. L. iv.
Dryden, who has translated considerable por
tions of his works, thus speaks of him as a poet
"If the imitation of nature," says he, "be the
business of a poet, I know no author who can
justly be compared with Ovid, especially in the
description of the passions: and, to prove this, I
shall need no other judges than the generality
of his readers: for all passions being inborn with
us, we are almost equally judges when we are
concerned in the representation of them. Now,
I will appeal to any man, who has read this
poet, whether he finds not the natural emotion
of the same passion in himself, which the poet
describes in his feigned persons? His thoughts,
which are the pictures and results of those pas-
sions, are generally such as naturally arise from
those disorderly motions of our spirits. Yet not
to speak too partially in his behalf, I will confess,
that the copiousness of his wit was such that he
often wrote too pointedly for his subject, and
made his persons speak more eloquently than
the violence of their passion would admit; so that
he is frequently witty out of season; leaving the
imitation of nature, and the cooler dictates of
his judgment, for the false applause of fancy.
Yet he seems to have found out this imperfection in his riper age; for why else should he complain that his Metamorphoses were left unfinished? Nothing sure can be added to the wit of that poem, or of the rest; but many things ought to have been retrenched, which I suppose would have been the business of his age, if his misfortunes had not come too fast on him. But take him uncorrected as he is transmitted to us, and it must be acknowledged that Seneca's censure will stand good against him: He never knew how to give over, when he had done well:' but continually varying the same sense a hundred ways, and taking up in another place what he had more than enough inculcated before, he sometimes cloys his readers instead of satisfying them. This then is the alloy of Ovid's writing, which is sufficiently recompensed by his other excellences; nay, this very fault is not without its beauties; for the most severe censor cannot but be pleased with the prodigality of his wit, though, at the same time, he could have wished that the master of it had been a better manager."
CREATION OF THE WORLD.
Or bodies changed to various forms I sing:
Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with celestial heat,
Till I my long laborious work complete;
And add perpetual tenor to my rhymes,
Deduced from Nature's birth to Cæsar's times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And heaven's high canopy that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd and unframed,
Of jarring seeds, and justly Chaos named.
No sun was lighted up the world to view,
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew.
Nor yet was earth suspended in the sky,
Nor poised, did on her own foundations lie,
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was impress'd;
All were confused, and each disturb'd the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fix'd,
And soft with hard, and light with heavy,
mix'd.
But God, or Nature, while they thus contend,
To these intestine discords put an end.
The force of fire ascended first on high,
And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky:
Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire,
Whose atoms from inactive earth retire;
Earth sinks beneath, and draws a numerous throng
Of ponderous, thick, unwieldly, seeds along.
About her coasts unruly waters roar,
And, rising on a ridge, insult the shore
Thus when the god, whatever god was he,
Had form'd the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded earth into a spacious round:
Then, with a breath, he gave the winds to blow,
And bade the congregated waters flow.
He adds the running springs, and standing lakes;
And bounding banks for winding rivers makes.
Some parts in earth are swallow'd up, the most
In ample oceans disembogued, are lost.
He shades the woods, the valleys he restrains
With rocky mountains, and extends the plains.
And as five zones the ethereal regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to earth assign'd:
The sun, with rays directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone;
The two beneath the distant poles complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt the extremes, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot and cold.
The fields of liquid air, enclosing all,
Surround the compass of this earthly ball:
The lighter parts lie next the fires above,
Then earth from air, and seas from earth, were The grosser near the watery surface move:
And grosser air sunk from ethereal heaven.
Thick clouds are spread, and storms engender there,
Thus disembroil'd, they take their proper place; And thunder's voice, which wretched mortals
The next of kin contiguously embrace;
And foes are sunder'd by a larger space.
And winds, that on their wings cold winter bear.
Nor were those blust'ring brethren left at large, | Ere sails were spread new oceans to explore,
On seas and shores their fury to discharge:
Bound as they are, and circumscribed in place,
They rend the world, resistless, where they
And mighty marks of mischief leave behind;
Such is the rage of their tempestuous kind.
First Eurus to the rising morn is sent
(The regions of the balmy continent,)
And eastern realms, where, early, Persians run
To greet the bless'd appearance of the sun.
Westward, the wanton Zephyr wings his flight,
Pleased with the remnants of departing light.
Fierce Boreas, with his offspring, issues forth
To invade the frozen wagon of the north;
While frowning Auster seeks the southern sphere,
And rots, with endless rain, the unwholesome
year.
High o'er the clouds, and empty realms of wind,
The god a clearer space for heaven design'd;
Where fields of light, and liquid ether flow,
Purged from the ponderous dregs of earth below.
Scarce had the power distinguish'd these, when
straight
The stars, no longer overlaid with weight,
Exert their heads from underneath the mass,
And upward shoot, and kindle as they pass,
And with diffusive light adorn their heavenly
place.
Then, every void of nature to supply,
With forms of gods he fills the vacant sky;
And happy mortals, unconcern'd for more,
Confined their wishes to their native shore.
No walls were yet, nor fence, nor moat, nor
mound,
Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet's angry sound,
Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and
crime,
The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow :
Content with food which Nature freely bred,
On wildings and on strawberries they fed;
Cornels and brambleberries gave the rest,
And falling acorns furnished out a feast.
The flowers unsown, in fields and meadows
reign'd;
And western winds immortal spring maintain'd.
In following years the bearded corn ensued
From earth unask'd, nor was that earth renew'd.
From veins of valleys milk and nectar broke,
And honey sweating through the pores of oak.
BUT when good Saturn, banish'd from above,
Was driven to hell, the world was under Jove.
Succeeding times a silver age behold,
Excelling brass, but more excelled by gold.
Then summer, autumn, winter, did appear,
And spring was but a season of the year;
The sun his annual course obliquely made,
New herds of beasts he sends the plains to Good days contracted, and enlarged the bad.
New colonies of birds to people air;
And to their oozy beds the finny fish repair.
A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man design'd:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form'd, and fit to rule the rest:
Whether with particles of heavenly fire
The God of nature did his soul inspire,
Or earth, but new divided from the sky,
And pliant, still retained the ethereal energy,
Which wise Prometheus temper'd into paste,
And, mix'd with living streams, the godlike
image cast.
Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.
From such rude principles our form began,
And earth was metamorphosed into man.
Then air with sultry heats began to glow,
The wings of winds were clogg'd with ice and
And shivering mortals into houses driven,
Sought shelter from the inclemency of heaven.
Those houses, then, were caves or homely sheds,
With twining osiers fenced, and moss their beds.
Then ploughs, for seed, the fruitful furrows broke,
And oxen laboured first beneath the yoke.
To this came next in course the brazen age; A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage, Not impious yet.
HARD steel succeeded then,
And stubborn as the metal were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook;
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
Then sails were spread to every wind that blew,
Raw were the sailors and the depths were new;
THE golden age was first, when man, yet new, Trees, rudely hollow'd, did the waves sustain,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew,
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear,
His words were simple, and his soul sincere;
Needless was written law, where none oppress'd;
The law of man was written on his breast:
No suppliant crowds before the judge appear'd,
No court erected yet, nor cause was heard,
But all was safe: for conscience was their guard.
The mountain trees in distant prospect please,
Ere yet the pine descended to the seas;
Ere ships in triumph plough'd the watery plain.
Then landmarks limited to each his right;
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone required to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share,
But greedy mortals rummaging her store,
Digg'd from her entrails first the precious ore
(Which next to hell the prudent gods had laid,)
| And that alluring ill to sight display'd.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold:
Then rushing onwards, with a sweepy sway, Bear flocks, and folds, and lab'ring hinds away.
And double death did wretched man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betrayed.
Now (brandish'd weapons glittering in their Nor safe their dwellings were; for, sapp'd by
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands:
No rights of hospitality remain;
The guest, by him who harbour'd him, is slain;
The son-in-law pursues the father's life;
The wife her husband murders, he the wife;
The stepdame poison for the son prepares;
The son inquires into his father's years;
Faith flies, and piety in exile mourns;
And Justice, here oppress'd, to heaven returns.
ALREADY had Jove toss'd the flaming brand,
And roll'd the thunder in his spacious hand;
Preparing to discharge on seas and land:
But stopp'd, for fear, thus violently driven,
The sparks should catch his axle-tree of heaven.
Rememb'ring, in the Fates, a time, when fire
Should to the battlements of heaven aspire,
And all his blazing worlds above should burn,
And all the inferior globe to cinders turn.
His dire artillery thus dismiss'd, he bent
His thoughts to some securer punishment:
Concludes to pour a wat'ry deluge down;
And, what he durst not burn, resolves to drown.
The Northern breath, that freezes floods, he
binds;
With all the race of cloud-dispelling winds:
The South he loos'd, who night and horror brings;
And fogs are shaken from his flaggy wings.
From his divided beard two streams he pours;
His head and rheumy eyes distil in showers.
The skies, from pole to pole, with peals resound:
And showers enlarg'd come pouring on the
ground.
Then clad in colours of a various dye,
Junonian Iris breeds a new supply
To feed the clouds: impetuous rain descends;
The bearded corn beneath the burthen bends:
Defrauded clowns deplore their perish'd grain;
And the long labours of the year are vain.
Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down:
Aid from his brother of the seas he craves,
To help him with auxiliary waves.
The wat`ry tyrant calls his brooks and floods,
Who roll from mossy caves, their moist abodes;
And with perpetual urns his palace fill:
To whom, in brief, he thus imparts his will.
Small exhortation needs; your powers employ:
And this bad world (so Jove requires) destroy.
Let loose the reins to all your wat'ry store:
Bear down the dams, and open every door.
The floods, by nature enemies to land,
And proudly swelling with their new command,
Remove the living stones that stopp'd their way,
And, gushing from their source, augment the sea.
Then, with his mace, their monarch struck the
ground:
With inward trembling earth receiv'd the wound;
And rising streams a ready passage found.
The expanded waters gather on the plain,
They float the fields, and overtop the grain;
Their houses fell upon their household gods.
The solid piles, too strongly built to fall,
High o'er their heads behold a wat`ry wall.
Now seas and earth were in confusion lost;
A world of waters, and without a coast.
One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne,
And ploughs above, where late he sow'd his corn.
Others o'er chimney tops and turrets row,
And drop their anchors on the meads below:
Or downward driven, they bruise the tender vine,
Or toss'd aloft, are knock'd against a pine.
And where of late the kids had cropp'd the
The monsters of the deep now take their place. Insulting Nereids on the cities ride,
And wondering dolphins o'er the palace glide. On leaves, and masts of mighty oaks, they browse;
And their broad fins entangle in the boughs.
The frighted wolf now swims among the sheep,
The yellow lion wanders in the deep:
His rapid force no longer helps the boar:
The stag swims faster than he ran before.
The fowls, long beating on their wings in vain,
Despair of land, and drop into the main.
Now hills and vales no more distinction know,
And levell'd nature lies oppress'd below.
The most of mortals perish in the flood,
The small remainder dies for want of food.
A mountain of stupendous height there stands
Betwixt the Athenian and Baotian lands,
The bound of fruitful fields, while fields they
But then a field of waters did appear:
Parnassus is its name; whose forky rise
Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty
High on the summit of this dubious cliff,
Deucalion, wafted, moor'd his little skiff.
He with his wife were only left behind
Of perish'd man; they two were human kind.
The Mountain-nymphs and Themis they adore,
And from her oracles relief implore.
The most upright of mortal men was he;
The most sincere and holy woman, she.
When Jupiter, surveying earth from high,
Beheld it in a lake of water lie,
That, where so many millions lately liv'd,
But two, the best of either sex, surviv'd,
He loos'd the northern wind; fierce Boreas flies
To puff away the clouds, and purge the skies:
Serenely, while he blows, the vapours driven
Discover heaven to earth, and earth to heaven
The billows fall, while Neptune lays his mace
On the rough sea, and smooths its furrow'd face,
Already Triton, at his call, appears
Above the waves; a Tyrian robe he wears;
And in his hand a crooked trumpet bears.
The sovereign bids him peaceful sounds inspire,
And give the waves the signal to retire.
The waters, listening to the trumpet's roar,
Obey the summons, and forsake the shore.
A thin circumference of land appears;
And Earth, but not at once, her visage rears,
And peeps upon the seas from upper grounds:
The streams, but just contain'd within their
bounds,
By slow degrees into their channels crawl;
And earth increases as the waters fall.
In longer time the tops of trees appear,
Which mud on their dishonour'd branches bear.
At length the world was all restor'd to view,
But desolate, and of a sickly hue:
Nature beheld herself, and stood aghast,
A dismal desert, and a silent waste.
TRANSFORMATION OF DAPHNE INTO A LAUREL. THE first and fairest of his loves was she Whom not blind Fortune, but the dire decree Of angry Cupid forced him to desire; Daphne her name, and Peneus was her sire. Swell'd with the pride that new success attends, He sees the stripling, while his bow he bends, And thus insults him: "Thou lascivious boy, Are arms like these for children to employ? Know, such achievements are my proper claim, Due to my vigour and unerring aim; Resistless are my shafts, and Python late, In such a feather'd death has found his fate. Take up thy torch (and lay my weapons by,) With that the feeble souls of lovers fry." To whom the son of Venus thus replied: "Phœbus, thy shafts are sure on all beside, But mine on Phœbus; mine the fame shall be Of all thy conquests, when I conquer thee."
He said, and soaring, swiftly wing'd his flight, Nor stopp'd, but on Parnassus' airy height. Two different shafts he from his quiver draws, One to repel desire, and one to cause. One shaft is pointed with refulgent gold, To bribe the love and make the lover bold; One blunt, and tipp'd with lead, whose base allay Provokes disdain, and drives desire away. The blunted bolt against the nymph he dress'd, But with the sharp transfix'd Apollo's breast.
The enamour'd deity pursues the chase; The scornful damsel shuns his loath'd embrace: In hunting beasts of prey her youth employs, And Phœbe rivals in her rural joys: With naked neck she goes, and shoulders bare, And with a fillet binds her flowing hair. By many suitors sought, she mocks their pains, And still her vow'd virginity maintains. On wilds and woods she fixes her desire; Nor knows what youth and kindly love inspire. Her father chides her oft: "Thou owest," says he, "A husband to thyself, a son to me." She, like a crime, abhors the nuptial bed; She glows with blushes, and she hangs her head: Then, casting round his neck her tender arms, Soothes him with blandishments and filial charms.
"Give me, my lord," she said, "to live and die A spotless maid, without the marriage tie; 'Tis but a small request; I beg no more Than what Diana's father gave before." The good old sire was soften'd to consent; But said her wish would prove her punishment;
For so much youth and so much beauty join'd,
Opposed the state which her desires design'd.
The god of light, aspiring to her bed,
Hopes what he seeks, with flattering fancies
fed,
And is, by his own oracles, misled.
And as in empty fields the stubble burns,
Or nightly travellers, when day returns,
Their useless torches on dry hedges throw,
That catch the flames, and kindle all the row,
So burns the god, consuming in desire,
And feeding in his breast a fruitless fire:
Her well-turn'd neck he view'd (her neck was
bare,)
And on her shoulders her dishevell'd hair:
"O were it comb'd," said he, "with what a grace
Would every waving curl become her face!"
He view'd her eyes, like heavenly lamps that
shone,
![[ocr errors]](https://books.google.com.my/books/content?id=MkkQAAAAIAAJ&output=html_text&pg=PA492&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&q=bear&cds=1&sig=ACfU3U1ePwuj01UWdmkJGhMXqFIO7z-Pvw&edge=0&edge=stretch&ci=510,581,11,8)
He view'd her lips, too sweet to view alone.
Swift as the wind the damsel fled away,
Nor did for these alluring speeches stay.
'Stay, nymph," he cried, "I follow, not a foe.
Thus from the lion trips the trembling doe;
Thus from the wolf the frighten'd lamb removes,
And from pursuing falcons fearful doves:
Thou shunn'st a god, and shunn'st a god that
loves.
Ah, lest some thorn should pierce thy tender foot,
Or thou shouldst fall in flying my pursuit!
To sharp uneven ways thy steps decline;
Abate thy speed, and I will bate of mine.
Yet think from whom thou dost so rashly fly;
Nor basely born, nor shepherd's swain am I.
Perhaps thou know'st not my superior state;
And from that ignorance proceeds thy hate.
Me Claros, Delphos, Tenedos, obey;
These hands the Patareian sceptre sway:
The king of gods begot me: what shall be,
Or is, or ever was, in fate, I see:
Mine is the invention of the charming lyre:
Sweet notes, and heavenly numbers, I inspire:
Sure is my bow, unerring is my dart;
But ah! more deadly his who pierc'd my heart.
Medicine is mine; what herbs and simples grow
In fields and forests, all their powers I know,
And am the great physician call'd below.
Alas! that fields and forests can afford
No remedies to heal their love-sick lord:
To cure the pains of love no plant avails;
And his own physic the physician fails."
She heard not half, so furiously she flies;
And on her ear the imperfect accent dies.
Fear gave her wings; and, as she fled, the wind
Increasing, spread her flowing hair behind.
As when the impatient greyhound, slipp'd from
Bounds o'er the glebe, to course the fearful hare,
She in her speed does all her safety lay;
And he with double speed pursues the prey;
O'erruns her at the sitting turn, and licks
His chaps in vain, and blows upon the flix:
She scapes, and for the neighb`ring covert strives,
And, gaining shelter, doubts if yet she lives.
If little things with great we may compare,
Such was the god, and such the flying fair;
|