XVII.
FINE WEATHER ON THE DIGENTIA.
Horatius Cogitabundus.
1.
Favonius changes with sunny kisses
The spring's ice-fetters to bands of flowers,
And the delicate Graces, those thin-skinn'd Misses,
Are beginning to dance with the rosy Hours;
The Dryades, feeling the breeze on their bosoms,
Thro' tuby branches are blowing out blossoms;
The naked Naiad of every pool,
Lest the sunshine should drive her to playing the fool,
Lies full length in the water and keeps herself cool;
Pan is piping afar, 'mid the trees,
His ditty dies on the dying breeze,
While a wood-nymph leaneth her head on his knees,
In a dream, in a dream, with her wild eyes glistening,
Her bosom throbbing, her whole soul listening!
In fact, 'tis the season of billing and cooing,
Amorous flying and fond pursuing,
Kissing, and pressing, and mischief-doing;
And pleasant it is to take one's tipple
In the mild warm breath of the spicy South,
And deftly to fasten one's lips to the mouth
Of a flasket warmer than Venus' nipple!
Pleasant, pleasant, at this the season
When folly is reason and reason treason,
When nought is so powerful near or far
As the palpitating
Titillating
Twinkle, twinkle, of the Cyprian star!
2.
But what has a shaky quaky fellow,
Full of the sunshine but over-mellow,
To do with the beautiful Lesbian Queen,
The pink-eyed precious with locks of yellow,
The goddess of twenty and sweet eighteen,
Whose double conquest o'er Pride and Spleen
In the Greek King's bed put a viper green
And darken'd the seas with the Grecian force?
Nothing, of course!
Well, even I have of joy my measure
And can welcome the newborn Adonis with pleasure;
For since at Philippi, worst of scrapes,
I saved my skin for the good of the nation,
And made my pious asseveration
To scorn ambition and cultivate grapes,
I've found by a curious convolution
Of physical ailments and heavenly stars,
And of wisdom wean'd on the blood-milk of Mars,
That my pluck is surpass'd by my elocution—
And learnt, in fine,
That rosy wine
And sunshine agree with my constitution!
(
Bibit.)
3.
Pleasant it is, I say, to sit here,
Just in the sunshine without the threshold,
And, with fond fingers and lips, caress old
Bacchus' bottle, the source of wit, here!
Drowsily hum the honey-bees,
Drowsily murmur the birds in the trees,
Drowsily drops the spicy breeze,
Drowsily I sit at mine ease.
4.
An idle life is the life for me,—
Idleness spiced by philosophy!
I care not a fig for the cares of business,
Politics fill me with doubt and dizziness,
Pomps and triumphs are simply a bore to me,
Crude ambition will come no more to me,
I hate the vulgar popular cattle,
And I modestly blush at the mention of battle.
No!—Here is my humble definition
Of a perfectly happy and virtuous condition:
A few fat acres aroundabout,
To give one a sense of possession; a few
Servants to pour the sweet Massic out;
Plenty to eat and nothing to do;
A feeling of cozy and proud virility;
A few stray pence;—
And the tiniest sense
Of self-conserving responsibility!
5.
For, what is Life?—or, rather ask here,
What is that fountain of music and motion
We call th Soul?—As I sit and bask here,
I confess that I haven't the slightest notion
Yet Plato calls it eternal, telling
How its original lofty dwelling
Was among the stars, till, fairly repining
At eternally turning a pivot and shining,
Heaven it quitted
To dwell unpitied
In a fleshly mansion of wining and whining;
Aristotle, I don't know why,
Believes that, born up above in the sky
The moment that Body is born on the earth,
'Tis married to Body that moment of birth;
Hippo and others, whose heads were a muddle,
Affirm 'tis compounded of water—puddle!
Fire, not a few, with Democritus, swear;
While others—chameleons—reduce it to Air;
Water and fire, cries Hippocrates!
No, water and earth, cries Xenophanes!
Earth and fire, cries Parmenides!
Stop! cries Empedocles,—all of these!
Ennius follow'd Pythagoras, thinking
The transmigration of spirits a truth;—
A doctrine I choose to apply in sooth
To the spirit that lies in the wine I'm drinking;
Speculation, muddle, trouble,
Some see obliquely, others double,
While under their noses,
Which smell not the roses,
Truth placidly bursts like a spangled bubble.
6.
Altogether, they puzzle me quite,
They all seem wrong and they all seem right.
The puzzle remains an unsatisfied question;
But Epicurus has flatly tried
To prove that the soul is closely allied
To wine, and sunshine, and good digestion.
For without any prosing, head-racking, or preaching,
That's the construction I put on his teaching!
'Tis simple: the Soul and the Body are one,
Like the Sun itself and the light of the Sun,
Born to change with all other creations,
Homunculi, qualities, emanations,
To pass thro' wondrous and strange gradations;
And if this be the case, our best resource
Is to make the most of our time, of course,
Nor grumble and question till hoary and hoarse.
And I slightly improve upon Epicurus,
Who shirk'd good living, as some assure us,
And assert, from experience long and rare,
That body and soul can be perfectly snug,
With sunshine, fresh air,
And no physical care,
In a garden that never requires to be dug.
7.
I, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, am learning
From the tuneful stars in my zenith turning,
From my bachelorhood, which is wide awake,
That the sum of good is a life of ease,
A friend or two, if the humour please,
And not a tie it would pain you to break.
Call me selfish, indolent, vain,
But I don't and won't see the virtue of pain,
Be it of body or be it of brain;
Philippi finish'd my education,
For it taught me the doctrine of self-preservation.
I hate the barking of Scylla's dogs,
Round Charybdis your sailor may spin, but not I:—
In short, I am one of those excellent hogs
That grunt in the Grecian epicure's sty.
Day by day, my delight has grown wider
Since I learnt that wine is a natural good,
And the stubborn donkey called Fortitude
Has a knack of upsetting the bile of its rider.
All creeds that vex one are mere vexation;
But I firmly believe, and no man dare doubt me,
In Massic taken in moderation,
And I like to dwell where no fools can flout me—
Sans physical care,
In the sunny air,
And to sing—when I feel the fresh world about me!
(
Bibit.)
8.
Bear witness, Flower!—One's sense perceives
The rich sap lying within your leaves,
Which lusciously swoon to a soft blood-red
As the sunlight woos them from overhead!
Now, here is a parallel worth inspection
Of body and blood in perfect connexion
With what some call Soul, that obscure abstraction
Which I have proved to my satisfaction
To be Body in lesser or greater perfection.
The perfect parts of the perfect flower
Were nourish'd by sunshine for many an hour,
Till the sunshine within them o'erflowing—hence
The juice whose odorous quintessence,
Though sweetly expressing the parts and the whole,
Is simply a part of the whole, and still
Inseparate from the general will.
The Flower is the Body, the Scent is the Soul!
See! I press a thorn in the milky stalk:
The small thing droops o'er the garden walk,
The soft leaves shiver, the sap runs dry,
And never more will the flower's mild eye
Drink the breath of the moon—it will linger, and die.
But the scent of the flower, some would cry, is the sweeter;
True, but the scent, every moment, grows less,
And, further observing, they would confess,
That the flower, as a flower, is the incompleter!
Well, between my fingers I sharpl press
The delicate leaves, and thro' every vein
The perfect anatomy shrinks with pain,
And the flower with its odorous quintessence
Will never, 'tis clear, be perfection again.
Bah! I pluck it, I pluck it, and cast it hence,
As Death plucks humanity body and brain!
But the odour has not yet flown, you cry,
It sweetens the air, tho' the flower doth die!
Of course; and the feelers and stem and leaves,
And the sap and the odour it interweaves,
No longer perfect and gastronomic,
Are in common resolving themselves, one perceives,
Back to first principles—say atomic;
And whatever destination your fine
Hard-headed philosophers choose to assign
To the several parts, they are reft of their power,
And, so far as concerns its true functions—to scent
The soft air, and look fair—and its first sweet intent,
'Tis clear that the whole is no longer a Flower.
9.
Take that bulky and truly delectable whole,
The egotistic disciple of Bacchus,
With small hare's-eyes and gray hairs on his poll,
Myself—good Quintus Horatius Flaccus!
There's a Body! There's a Soul!
Many a year, over Rome's dominions,
Has he vaunted his Epicurean opinions:
He may be wrong, he may be right,
So he roars his creed in no mad heroics,—
Since down in the grave, where all creeds unite
Even Epicureans are changed to Stoics.
(
Bibit.)
10.
Humph, the grave!—not the pleasantest prospect, affirms
This quiet old heart starting up with a beat—
Well, 'tis rather hard that liquor so sweet
Goes simply to flavour a meal for worms!
After all, I'm a sensible man,
To render my span
As happy and easeful as ever I can.
To-morrow may mingle, who knows, who knows,
The Life that is Dream with the Death that is Sleep,
And the grass that covers my last repose
May make a sward where the lambkins leap
Round a mild-eyed mellifluous musical boy
Who pipes to his flock in a pastoral joy,
While the sun that is shining upon him there
Draws silver threads thro' his curly hair,
And Time with long shadows stalks past the spot,
And the Hours pass by, and he sees them not!
Instead of moping and idly rueing it,
Now, this is the pleasantest way of viewing it!—
To think, when all is over and done,
Of insensately feeling one's way to the sun,
Of being a part of the verdure that chases
The mild west-wind into shady places,
While one's liver, warming the roots of a tree,
Creeps upward and flutters delectably
In the leaves that tremble and sigh and sing,
And the breath bubbles up in a daisy ring,
And the heart, mingling strangely with rains and snows,
Bleeds up thro' the turf in the blood of a rose.
11.
Which reminds me, here, that the simile drawn
From the flower that is withering on the lawn,
May, by a stretch of the thought, apply
To the universe—ocean, earth, air, and sky;
And dividing the whole into infinite less,
First principles, atomies numberless,
We find that the sum of the universe strange
Suffers continual mystical change;
While the parts of the whole, tho' their compounds range
Thro' all combinations from men down to daisies,
Are eternal, unchangeable, suffer no phases.
So that Death, to the dullest of heads so unsightly,
Is (here I improve Epicurus slightly)
Is but the period of dissolution
Into some untraceable constitution
Of the several parts of the Body and Soul,—
And the total extinction of Man as a whole.
As to Time—mere abstraction! With even motion
Like waves that gathering foamy speech
Grow duskily up on a moonlit beach,
And seem to increase the huge bulk of the ocean,
Hours roll upon hours in the measureless sea
Of eternity:
Never ceasing, they seem increasing;
But the parts of the Infinite, changing never,
Increase not, tho changing, the Whole, the For Ever.
Time? Call it a compound, if you please,
A divisible drop in eternal seas,
An abstract figure, by which we men
Try to count our sensations again and again,
And then you will know, perceiving we must
Nourish some compound with dust of dust,
And seeing how short our sensations and powers,
Why I am one,
Who sits in the sun,
Whose Time is no limited number of hours,
But wine ever-present, in nectarine showers.
12.
O Mutability, dread abstraction,
Let me be wise in the satisfaction
Of my moderate needs in a half-inaction!
While Propertius grows love-sick and weary and wan,
While thou, Virgil, singest of arms and the man,
While assassins on Cæsar sharpen their eyes,
While Agrippa stands grimly on blood-stained decks,
While Mæcenas flirts with the female sex,
Teach me to sport and philosophize!
O Mutability, lasting ever,
Changing ever, yet changing never,
Teach me, O teach me, and make me wise!—
In the dreadful depth of thy eyeballs dumb,
Strange meanings flutter and pass to nought,
And beautiful images fade as they come,
Thro' an under-trouble of shady thought!
13.
Yonder, yonder, the River doth run,
From sun to shade, and from shade to sun,
Shaking the lilies to seed as it flows,
Under the willow-trees taking a doze,
And waking up in a flutter of fun!
Could you look at the leaves of yonder tree!
The wind is stirring them as the sun is stirring me!
The woolly clouds move quiet and slow,
In the pale blue calm of the tranquil skies,
And their shades that run on the grass below
Leave purple dreams in the violet's eyes!
The vine droops over my head with bright
Clusters of purple and green—the rose
Breaks her heart on the air—and the orange glows
Like golden lamps in an emerald night.
While I sit, with the stain of the wine on my lip,
Shall nature and I part fellowship?
No, by Bacchus! This view from the threshold of home
Is as glad to the core, and as sorrow-despising,
As Aphrodite when fresh from the foam
That still on her bosom was falling and rising,
While the sunshine crept thro' her briny hair
And mingled itself with the shadows there,
And her deepening eyes drank their azure from air,
And she blush'd a new beauty surpassingly fair!
14.
'Tis absurd to tell me to ruffle a feather,
Because there may soon be a change of weather.
When the Dog-Star foams, I will lie in the shade,
And watch the white sun thro' an emerald glade;
When winter murmurs with rain and storm,
I will watch my hearth smile to itself, and keep warm;
And for Death, who having fulfilled his task
Leaves his deputy Silence in houses of mourning,—
Well, I hope he no troublesome questions will ask,
But knock me down, like an ox, without warning.
Like the world, I most solemnly promise devotion
To pleasure commingled of light, music, motion.
I like (as I said) to sit here in my mirth,
To be part of the joy of the sweet-smelling earth,
To feel the blood blush like a flower with its glee,
To sing like a bird, to be stirr'd like a tree,
Drowsily, drowsily, sit at mine ease,
While the odd rhymes buzz in my brain like bees,
And over my wine-cup to chirp and to nod,
Ay to sit—till I fall
Like that peach from the wall—
Self-sufficient, serene, happy-eyed,—like a God!
(
Bibit.)
15.
Ay, crop the corn with the crooked sickle,
Sow harvest early and reap too late,
Prove Fortune friendly or false or fickle,
Blunder and bother with aching pate,
Attempting to conquer chance or fate,
Struggle, speculate, dig, and bleed,
Reap the whirlwind of Venus' seed,
O senseless, impotent human breed!
What avails! what avails! Were ye less intent
On your raking and digging, perchance ye'd behold
The fleecy vapours above you roll'd
Round the dozing Deities dead to strife,
With their mild great eyes on each other bent
Enchanging a wisdom indifferent
To the native honours of death and life.
Sober truths of a pleasure divine
Keep them supine!
The grand lazy fellows have nothing to do
With the hubble and trouble of me or of you,
The stars break around them in silver foam,
And they calmly amuse themselves, sometimes, by stealing
A peep at us pigmies, with much the same feeling
With which, from the candour and quiet of home,
I glance at the strife of political Rome.
Serene, happy-eyed, self-sufficient, they rest
On the hill where the blue sky is leaning her breast:—
Jove seated supreme in the midst, at his side
Apollo the Sun and Selene the Moon,
Juno half dozing, her foot of pride
On the neck of Venus the drowsy-eyed,
And Pallas humming the spheric tune.
16.
Flash!
Lightning, I swear!—there's a tempest brewing!
Crash!
Thunder, too—swift-footed lightning pursuing!
The leaves are troubled, the winds drop dead,
The air grows ruminant overhead—
Splash!
That great round drop fell pat on my nose.
Flash! crash! splash!—
I must run for it, I suppose.
O what a flashing and crashing and splashing,
The earth is rocking, the skies are riven—
Jove in a passion, in god-like fashion,
Is breaking the crystal urns of heaven.
