[221] "A reveller I go freighted with fire not wine beneath the region of my heart."
[222] "How could it be that poet also should not sing fair songs in spring?"
[223] Those who on the shores of the Mediterranean have traced out beds of red tulips or anemones or narcissus from terrace to terrace, over rocks and under olive-branches, know how delicately true to nature is the thought contained in the one epithet οὐρεσίφοιτα—roaming like nymphs along the hills, now single and now gathered into companies, as though their own sweet will had led them wandering.
Soar upward to the air divine:
Spread broad thy pinions aquiline:
Carry amid thy plumage him
Who fills Jove's beaker to the brim:
Take care that neither crookèd claw
Make the boy's thigh or bosom raw;
For Jove will wish thee sorry speed
If thou molest his Ganymede.
Drink now, and love, Democrates; for we
Shall not have wine and boys eternally:
Wreathe we our heads, anoint ourselves with myrrh,
Others will do this to our sepulchre:
Let now my living bones with wine be drenched;
Water may deluge them when I am quenched.
Gazing at stars, my star? I would that I were the welkin,
Starry with infinite eyes, gazing forever at thee!
Frederick Farrar.