You see how our Soracte now is standing
Hoary with heavy snow, and now its weight
To bear the struggling woods are hardly able,
And with the bitter cold the streams stagnate.
The cold melt thou away, oh, Thaliarchus,
By heaping logs upon thy fire, again
Replenishing, and from a Sabine flagon
Wine of a four years' vintage draw thou then.
Leave to the gods the rest; for at the moment
They felled the winds upon the boiling sea
That battled fiercely, then there was not stirring
Or mountain-ash, or ancient cypress tree.
Cease thou to ask what is to be to-morrow,
The day that Fortune gives, score thou as gain.
As when a boy, thou shalt not scorn love's sweetness,
Nor smoothly moving dancers shalt disdain
While crabbed age from thy fresh youth is distant.
Now in the Field and in the Public Square
All the soft whisperings that come at night-fall
Shall at the trysting be repeated there.
Now, too, the tempting laugh from a far corner
That must the maiden lurking there betray!
Also the pledge that she in feigned resistance,
Lets from her arm or hand be taken away!
TO CHLOE. I-23
Ah Chloe, like a fawn you now elude me,
Seeking its timid dam on lonely hills,
Its dam who not without an idle tremor
At breezes in the forest thrills.
For if before the breeze the bushes quiver
With rustling leaves, or if green lizards start
Across the bramble, then it is it trembles,—
This little fawn—in knees and heart.
But Chloe, I am not a cruel tiger,
Nor a Gætulian lion, thee to chase;
And now that thou art old enough to marry,
Beside thy mother take thy place.
TO FUSCUS. I-22
Oh, Fuscus, he whose life is pure and upright,
Wants not the Moorish javelin nor the bow,
Nor may he need the quiver, heavy laden
With arrows poisoned for the lurking foe.
Whether he is about to make a journey
To sultry Libya, or the unfriendly height
Of Caucasus, or to the distant places
That famed Hydaspes washes in his flight.
For lately me a wolf fled in the forest—
The Sabine forest, as my Lalage
I sang about,—beyond my boundaries wandering,
Care-free, unarmed—the creature fled from me.
Apulia, land of soldiers, never nourished
In her broad woods a monster of such girth,
Nor Mauritania, arid nurse of lions,
To such a one has ever given birth.
Ah, put me on those plains, remote and barren,
Where not a tree can feel the summer wind,
And grow again—a land of mist eternal—
Whereover Jupiter still broods, unkind;
Or place me in that land denied man's dwelling,
Too near the chariot of the sun above,—
Still my own Lalage so sweetly smiling,
My sweetly-speaking Lalage I'll love.
TO VENUS. III-26