Perhaps the sweetest touch of childhood in all Latin literature is that charming passage in Horace (Carm. Lib. III. 4):—
"Me fabulosæ Vulture in Apulo,
Nutrices extra limen Apuliæ,
Ludo fatigatoque somno
Fronde nova puerum palumbes
Texere,"
which Milman thus translates:—
"The vagrant infant on Mount Vultur's side,
Beyond my childhood's nurse, Apulia's bounds,
By play fatigued and sleep,
Did the poetic doves
With young leaves cover."
The amativeness of the dove has lent much to the figurative language of that second golden age, that other Eden where love is over all. Shenstone, in his beautiful pastoral, says:—
"I have found out a gift for my fair;
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed,"
and the "love of the turtle," "billing and cooing," are now transferred to human affection. Venus, the goddess of love, and the boy-god Cupid ride in a chariot drawn by doves, which birds were sacred to the sea-born child of Uranus. In the springtime, when "the voice of the turtle is heard in the land," then "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." If, from the sacred oaks of Dodona, to the first Greeks, the doves disclosed the oracles of Jove, so has "the moan of doves in immemorial elms" divulged to generation after generation of lovers the mission of his son of the bow and quiver.
Robin.
What the wood-pigeon was to Horace, the robin-redbreast has been to the children of old England. In the celebrated ballad of the "Children in the Wood", we are told that, after their murder by the cruel uncle,—
"No burial these pretty babes
Of any man receives,
Till Robin Redbreast piously
Did cover them with leaves."