A more voluptuous, richer gale.”
Of the amatory writers who exhaust rhetoric to express the infinity of kisses which they require from the lips of their mistresses, Catullus takes the lead. In his famous verses to Lesbia (Carm. 5), he says:
“Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and a farthing for all the talk of morose old sages! Suns may set and rise again; but we, when once our brief light has set, must sleep through a perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then still another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we shall have made up many thousands, we will confuse the reckoning, so that we ourselves may not know their amount, nor any spiteful person have it in his power to envy us when he knows that our kisses were so many.”
Roman superstition recognized an occult and mischievous potency in the sentiment of envy. Moreover, there was a prevalent notion that it excited the envy of the gods to count what gave one pleasure.
The following metrical versions of the foregoing are worth a place here. The first is by George Lamb (1821):
“Love, my Lesbia, while we live;
Value all the cross advice
That the surly graybeards give
At a single farthing’s price.