Before the summer-tropic fifty days
Thy keel may safely plough the azure ways.
The similarity of the lines may have caused the copyist’s omission of the two former. I am aware that the art of navigation was in that age imperfect: but if sea-faring men had learnt from experience that navigation was safe fifty days after the summer solstice, they could have learnt from the same teacher that it was equally safe fifty days before it: namely, in the months of May and June. Le Clerc.
[126] Men, too, may sail in spring.] What the poet says here of a spring voyage, I understand of that which may be made in the month of April: which is not much less liable to gales and storms than even the winter months. Certainly it was in April that the fig-tree began to be in leaf. Le Clerc.
[127] And wed the fifth of her expanded bloom.] She begins to bloom in her twelfth year. Let her wed in the fifth year of her puberty; that is, in her sixteenth. Guietus.
Robinson, not considering the difference of climate, supposes that the fourteenth year is the first of her puberty, and that she is directed to wed in her nineteenth.
[128] Shall send a fire thy vigorous bones within.] A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband, but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones. Proverbs, xii. 4.
[129] Nor lie with idle tongue.] Devise not a lie against thy brother, neither do the like to thy friend. Ecclesiasticus, vii. 12.
[130] Chastise his sin.] Far more liberal is the counsel of the son of Sirach:
Admonish a friend: it may be, he hath not done it; and if he have done it, that he may do it no more.