Time in a dream I beheld twi-winged, with one silently stealing
Joy, with the other he fanned kindly the tear-swollen eye.
Darin gleichet der Dichter dem Kind. Es erscheint das Bekannte
Ihm wie ein Wunder: Bekannt’ blickt das Geheimniss ihn an!
Dwells in a poet the child, who still with a feeling of wonder
Eyes the familiar; to him still looks familiar the strange.
The grand-master of epigrammatists, Martial, with the proud humility of conscious power, confessed himself a pupil of Catullus. But it was rather his purity of diction and naïve simplicity which Martial borrowed from the elder poet, not the point and sparkle of his epigrams, which are of right his own. The minor poems of Catullus include few which are strictly epigrams, and of these only two or three admit of distillation into a modern language. We give one which is addressed, like most of his amatory verse, to Lesbia. In this instance we abandon the attempt to reproduce the Latin elegiacs.
Lesbia mi dicit semper male, nec tacet unquam
De me. Lesbia me, dispeream, nisi amat!
Quo signo? Quasi non totidem mox deprecor illi
Assiduē, verum dispeream, nisi amo.
Always my Lesbia treats me ill,
By this I’ll swear she loves me well!
How so? I’m rude to her, but still
I’ll swear I love my Lesbia well!
While we are on the subject of lover’s whims and inconsistencies, we venture to give an experiment of our own. At least we may claim the expression, although the thought, if we remember rightly, belongs to Moore:
Love halts, you said, but will not stay,
And soon fares on his pilgrim’s way.
A pilgrim, yes! O’er wave and sand,
His eye still sought the Holy Land,
Welcomed each altar, as he passed,
Until he found the Shrine at last.