PROPERTIUS.

[Born 52,-Died 14, B. C.]

Or Sextus Aurelius Propertius we only know | Virgil, Ovid, and Bassus.-Considered as a writer that he was the son of a Roman knight, and a native of Umbria; that he early relinquished forensic for poetical pursuits; acquired the favour of Mecænas; and was on terms of intimacy with

The shepherd of the flock, the soldier of the fight, He liv'd while she was kind, and when she

Nor, without cause, he grasps those barbed darts,
The Cretan quiver o'er his shoulder cast;
Ere we suspect a foe, he strikes our hearts;
And those inflicted wounds for ever last.
In me are fix'd those arrows,-in my breast;
But, sure, his wings are shorn, the boy remains;
For never takes he flight, nor knows he rest;
Still, still I feel him warring through my veins.
In these scorch'd vitals dost thou joy to dwell?
Oh shame! to others let thine arrows flee;
Let veins, untouch'd, with all thy venom swell;
Not me thou torturest, but the shade of me.
Destroy me;-who shall then describe the fair?
This my light Muse to thee high glory brings;
When the nymphs' tapering fingers, flowing hair,
And eyes of jet, and gliding feet, she sings.

Book III.

FROM ELEGY III.

LONG as of youth the joyous hours remain,
Me may Castalia's sweet recess detain,
Fast by the umbrageous vale lull'd to repose,
Where Aganippe warbles as it flows;

Or roused by sprightly sounds from out the trance,
I'd in the ring knit hands, and join the Muses'
dance.

Give me to send the laughing bowl around,
My soul in Bacchus' pleasing fetters bound;
Let on this head unfading flowers reside,
There bloom the vernal rose's earliest pride;
And when, our flames commission'd to destroy,
Age steps 'twixt Love and me, and intercepts
the joy;

Who taught this vast machine its steadfast laws,
That first, eternal, universal cause;
Search to what regions yonder star retires,
That monthly waning hides her paly fires,
And whence, anew revived, with silver light,
Relumes her crescent-orb to cheer the dreary
night:

How rising winds the face of ocean sweep,
Where lie the eternal fountains of the deep,
And whence the cloudy magazines maintain
Their wintry war, or pour the autumnal rain.
How flames perhaps, with dire confusion hurl'd,
Shall sink this beauteous fabric of the world;
What colours paint the vivid arch of Jove;
What wondrous force the solid earth can move.
When Pindus' self approaching ruin dreads,
Shakes all his pines, and bows his hundred heads;
Why does yon orb, so exquisitely bright,
Obscure his radiance in a short-lived night;
Whence the Seven-Sisters' congregated fires,
And what Bootes' lazy waggon tires;

How the rude surge its sandy bounds control;
Who measured out the year, and bade the sea-

sons roll.

If realms beneath those fabled torments know,
Pangs without respite, fires that ever glow,
Earth's monster brood stretch'd on their iron bed,
The hissing terrors round Alecto's head,
Scarce to nine acres Tityus' bulk confined,
The triple dog that scares the shadowy kind,
All angry heaven inflicts, or hell can feel,
The pendant rock, Ixion's whirling wheel,
Famine at feasts, or thirst amid the stream;
Or are our fears the enthusiasts' empty dream,

When my changed head these locks no more And all the scenes that hurt the grave's repose

shall know,

And all its jetty honours turn to snow;
Then let me rightly speak of Nature's ways;
To Providence, to Him my thoughts I'd raise

But pictured horror and poetic woes?
These soft inglorious joys my hours engage;

Be love my youth's pursuit, and science crown
my age.

OVID.

[Born 43, B. C.,-Died 16, A. D.]

After many years spent at Rome-in the enjoyment of some of its best society, and in the practice of most of its worst vices-he by some

PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO was born of an honourable family at Sulmo, a town in the territory of the Peligni, in Italy. He was educated at Rome and Athens, under the best masters; ac-unascertained accident or offence, drew down on quired some reputation by his eloquence at the bar; and served a campaign under Marcus Varro, in Asia. His earliest inclinations had been always for poetry; but this was a luxury which he was scarcely at liberty to indulge, until after the deaths of his father and elder brother, from the latter of whom he inherited an ample fortune.

himself the displeasure of the emperor, and was banished to Tomi, a town of Pontus, on the Euxine sea, where, notwithstanding his own pathetic epistles, and the unceasing intercession of his friends, he was doomed to linger out his days. He died in the eighth year of his exile; in the fifty-ninth of his age; and in the sixteenth of the Christian era. Ovid had three wives; he was divorced from the two first, but seems to declaiming on the unprofitableness of the study, and ge- have entertained something like tenderness for

To deter him from it, his father was in the habit of

neral poverty of its professors—

Sæpe Pater dixit, "Studium quid inutile tentas?

Mæonides nullas ipse reliquit opes."-Trist. L. iv.

the third.

Dryden, who has translated considerable por

in his riper age; for why else should he complain that his Metamorphoses were left unfinished? Nothing sure can be added to the wit of that poem, or of the rest; but many things ought to have been retrenched, which I suppose would have been the business of his age, if his misfortunes had not come too fast on him. But take him uncorrected as he is transmitted to us, and it must be acknowledged that Seneca's censure will stand good against him: 'He never knew how to give over, when he had done well:' but continually varying the same sense a hun

tions of his works, thus speaks of him as a poet- | Yet he seems to have found out this imperfection "If the imitation of nature," says he, "be the business of a poet, I know no author who can justly be compared with Ovid, especially in the description of the passions: and, to prove this, I shall need no other judges than the generality of his readers: for all passions being inborn with us, we are almost equally judges when we are concerned in the representation of them. Now, I will appeal to any man, who has read this poet, whether he finds not the natural emotion of the same passion in himself, which the poet describes in his feigned persons? His thoughts, which are the pictures and results of those pas-dred ways, and taking up in another place what sions, are generally such as naturally arise from those disorderly motions of our spirits. Yet not to speak too partially in his behalf, I will confess, that the copiousness of his wit was such that he often wrote too pointedly for his subject, and made his persons speak more eloquently than the violence of their passion would admit; so that he is frequently witty out of season; leaving the imitation of nature, and the cooler dictates of his judgment, for the false applause of fancy.manager."

he had more than enough inculcated before, he sometimes cloys his readers instead of satisfying them. This then is the alloy of Ovid's writing, which is sufficiently recompensed by his other excellences; nay, this very fault is not without its beauties; for the most severe censor cannot but be pleased with the prodigality of his wit, though, at the same time, he could have wished that the master of it had been a better

FROM THE METAMORPHOSES.

Book I.

CREATION OF THE WORLD.

Or bodies changed to various forms I sing:
Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with celestial heat,
Till I my long laborious work complete;
And add perpetual tenor to my rhymes,
Deduced from Nature's birth to Cæsar's times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And heaven's high canopy that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd and unframed,
Of jarring seeds, and justly Chaos named.
No sun was lighted up the world to view,
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew.
Nor yet was earth suspended in the sky,
Nor poised, did on her own foundations lie,
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was impress'd;
All were confused, and each disturb'd the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fix'd,
And soft with hard, and light with heavy,
mix'd.

But God, or Nature, while they thus contend,
To these intestine discords put an end.
Then earth from air, and seas from earth, were
driven,

And grosser air sunk from ethereal heaven.
Thus dis embroil'd, they take their proper place;
The next of kin contiguously embrace;
And foes are sunder'd by a larger space.

The force of fire ascended first on high,
And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky:
Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire,
Whose atoms from inactive earth retire;
Earth sinks beneath, and draws a numerous throng
Of ponderous, thick, unwieldly, seeds along.
About her coasts unruly waters roar,
And, rising on a ridge, insult the shore.
Thus when the god, whatever god was he,
Had form'd the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded earth into a spacious round:
Then, with a breath, he gave the winds to blow,
And bade the congregated waters flow.
He adds the running springs, and standing lakes;
And bounding banks for winding rivers makes.
Some parts in earth are swallow'd up, the most
In ample oceans disembogued, are lost.
He shades the woods, the valleys he restrains
With rocky mountains, and extends the plains.

And as five zones the ethereal regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to earth assign'd:
The sun, with rays directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone;
The two beneath the distant poles complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt the extremes, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot and cold.
The fields of liquid air, enclosing all,
Surround the compass of this earthly ball:
The lighter parts lie next the fires above,
The grosser near the watery surface move:
Thick clouds are spread, and storms engender
there,

And thunder's voice, which wretched mortals

fear,

And winds, that on their wings cold winter bear.

Nor were those blust'ring brethren left at large,
On seas and shores their fury to discharge:
Bound as they are, and circumscribed in place,
They rend the world, resistless, where they
pass,

And mighty marks of mischief leave behind;
Such is the rage of their tempestuous kind.
First Eurus to the rising morn is sent
(The regions of the balmy continent,)
And eastern realms, where, early, Persians run
To greet the bless'd appearance of the sun.
Westward, the wanton Zephyr wings his flight,
Pleased with the remnants of departing light.
Fierce Boreas, with his offspring, issues forth
To invade the frozen wagon of the north;
While frowning Auster seeks the southern sphere,
And rots, with endless rain, the unwholesome
year.

High o'er the clouds, and empty realms of wind,
The god a clearer space for heaven design'd;
Where fields of light, and liquid ether flow,
Purged from the ponderous dregs of earth below.
Scarce had the power distinguish'd these, when
straight

The stars, no longer overlaid with weight,
Exert their heads from underneath the mass,
And upward shoot, and kindle as they pass,
And with diffusive light adorn their heavenly
place.

Then, every void of nature to supply,

With forms of gods he fills the vacant sky;

Ere sails were spread new oceans to explore,
And happy mortals, unconcern'd for more,
Confined their wishes to their native shore.
No walls were yet, nor fence, nor moat, nor
mound,

Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet's angry sound,
Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and
crime,

The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow :
Content with food which Nature freely bred,
On wildings and on strawberries they fed;
Cornels and brambleberries gave the rest,
And falling acorns furnished out a feast.
The flowers unsown, in fields and meadows
reign'd;

And western winds immortal spring maintain’d.
In following years the bearded corn ensued
From earth unask'd, nor was that earth renew'd.
From veins of valleys milk and nectar broke,
And honey sweating through the pores of oak.

SILVER AGE.

BUT when good Saturn, banish'd from above,
Was driven to hell, the world was under Jove.
Succeeding times a silver age behold,
Excelling brass, but more excelled by gold.
Then summer, autumn, winter, did appear,
And spring was but a season of the year;
The sun his annual course obliquely made,

New herds of beasts he sends the plains to Good days contracted, and enlarged the bad.

share;

New colonies of birds to people air;

And to their oozy beds the finny fish repair.
A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man design'd:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form'd, and fit to rule the rest:
Whether with particles of heavenly fire
The God of nature did his soul inspire,
Or earth, but new divided from the sky,
And pliant, still retained the ethereal energy,
Which wise Prometheus temper'd into paste,
And, mix'd with living streams, the godlike
image cast.

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.
From such rude principles our form began,
And earth was metamorphosed into man.

GOLDEN AGE.

Then air with sultry heats began to glow,
The wings of winds were clogg'd with ice and
snow;

And shivering mortals into houses driven,
Sought shelter from the inclemency of heaven.
Those houses, then, were caves or homely sheds,
With twining osiers fenced, and moss their beds.
Then ploughs, for seed, the fruitful furrows broke,
And oxen laboured first beneath the yoke.

BRAZEN AGE.

To this came next in course the brazen age; A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage, Not impious yet.

IRON AGE.

HARD steel succeeded then,
And stubborn as the metal were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook;
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
Then sails were spread to every wind that blew,
Raw were the sailors and the depths were new;

THE golden age was first, when man, yet new, Trees, rudely hollow'd, did the waves sustain, No rule but uncorrupted reason knew, And, with a native bent, did good pursue. Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear, His words were simple, and his soul sincere; Needless was written law, where none oppress'd; The law of man was written on his breast: No suppliant crowds before the judge appear'd, No court erected yet, nor cause was heard, But all was safe: for conscience was their guard. The mountain trees in distant prospect please, Ere yet the pine descended to the seas;

Ere ships in triumph plough'd the watery plain.
Then landmarks limited to each his right;
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone required to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share,
But greedy mortals rummaging her store,
Digg'd from her entrails first the precious ore
(Which next to hell the prudent gods had laid,)
And that alluring ill to sight display'd.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold: