OVID.

As I, when last eve's rosy joys I ruminated over:

To me another eve like that were immortality!

379

Awhile before with downcast head I walked a pining loverMore useless I had grown, 'twas said, than water-tank run dry.

No more my darling passes me with silent recognition,
Nor can she sit unmoved while I outpour my tender vow.
I wish that I had sooner realized this blest condition;
'Tis pouring living water on a dead man's ashes now.

In vain did others seek my love, in vain they called upon her, She leaned her head upon my breast, was kind as girl could be. Of conquered Parthians talk no more, I've gained a nobler honor, For she'll be spoils, and leaders, and triumphal car to me.

Light of my life! say, shall my bark reach shore with gear befitting, Or, dashed amid the breakers, with her cargo run aground? With thee it lies: but if, perchance, through fault of my committing, Thou giv'st me o'er, before thy door let my cold corse be found." CRANSTOUN.

Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.).—Publius Ovidius Na'so, the last of the Augustan poets, was a knight of Sulmo, an ancient Samnite town in the eastern part of Italy. Designed for the legal profession, he was sent to Rome to be educated; but the writing of verses was more congenial than rhetorical studies; and an eminent critic of the day, on hearing one of his early declamations, described it as "nothing else than poetry out of metre."

After the death of an elder son, his father consented that Publius should follow the bent of his own inclinations, and the poet went abroad to study in Greece and travel in Asia Minor. Returning to Rome, he began his literary career as the glory of the Augustan age was beginning to fade.

For twenty-two years Ovid wasted his talents on the composition of licentious love-poems. In the "Loves" (Amores), the earliest of his works, one Corinna is addressed throughout. The hearty reception with which these loose songs met at Rome is a sad comment on the degeneracy of the public taste and morals. They were followed by the "Hero'

ides," a collection of twenty-one imaginary love-letters, inscribed by the heroines of the past to their absent or unfaithful lords-an original idea with Ovid. Penelope indicts an epistle to Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Sappho to Phaon, etc. In the one last named, translated by Pope, the Lesbian poetess informs the youth of her resolve to take the Lover's Leap.

"A spring there is, where silver waters show,
Clear as a glass, the shining sands below;
A flowery lotus spreads its arms above,
Shades all the banks, and seems itself a grove:
Eternal greens the mossy margin grace,
Watched by the sylvan genius of the place.
Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood,
Before my sight a watery virgin stood:

She stood and cried, "O you that love in vain,
Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main!
There stands a rock, from whose impending steep

Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep;

There injured lovers, leaping from above,

Their flames extinguish and forget to love.
Hence, Sappho, haste! from high Leucadia throw
Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below.'
She spoke, and vanished with the voice-I rise,
And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove :
And much I fear; but ah! how much I love!
To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate,

And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.".

In the "Art of Love," Ovid again overleaped the bounds of propriety, and threw so brilliant a coloring into his pictures of vice that his readers were fain to linger over them, to enjoy, and to admire, with manifest danger to their own morals. When even a daughter of the imperial line was corrupted. by them, Augustus, the professed defender of virtue, felt that it was time to stop the dissemination of such principles, and visited the poet with his displeasure. In consequence of a subsequent and more serious offence, in some way con nected with the royal family, but the nature of which we can only conjecture, Ovid suddenly received notice to quit the

capital forever, and retire to To'mi, a dreary and desolate village on the Black Sea, A.D. 9. Despite his urgent prayers, the decree of banishment was never revoked.

The works of his eight years' exile are the "Tristia,” or Sorrows, "Letters from Pontus," and some shorter poems; they prove his genius to have been crushed, his spirit broken. Tomi gave Ovid a grave; even his request to be buried in Italy was refused.

The best of Ovid's works were the "Fasti," or Roman Calendar, a pleasant almanac in verse, and the "Metamorphoses," ingenious in both conception and expression. While engaged on the Fasti, which he intended to complete in twelve books, one dedicated to each month, the poet was surprised by the decree of banishment, and left his work unfinished.

The Metamorphoses, from which modern writers have largely drawn, gives an account of the transformations of ancient mythology, such as the changing of Io into a heifer, Daphne into a laurel, the sisters of Phaëton into the poplars of the Po, and Atlas into a mountain of stone by the gorgon-head of Perseus. One of the prettiest of these poems relates to the metamorphosis of the ivory statue wrought by Pygmalion, into a living bride, by the goddess of beauty, in answer to the sculptor's prayer :—

PYGMALION'S STATUE.

"The sculptor sought

His home, and, bending o'er the couch that bore

His Maiden's life-like image, to her lips

Fond pressed his own--and lo! her lips seemed warm,
And warmer, kissed again; and dimpling to his touch

The ivory seems to yield,—as in the sun
The waxen labor of Hymettus' bees,
By plastic fingers wrought, to various shape
And use by use is fashioned. Wonder-spelled,
Scarce daring to believe his bliss, in dread
Lest sense deluded mock him, on the form
He loves again and yet again his hand
Lays trembling touch, and to his touch a pulse

Within throbs answering palpable: 'twas flesh!
"Twas very life!-Then forth in eloquent flood
His grateful heart its thanks to Venus poured!
The lips he kissed were living lips that felt
His passionate pressure; o'er the virgin cheeks
Stole deepening crimson; and the unclosing eyes
At once on heaven and on their lover looked!"

HENRY KING.

With the death of Ovid, the flourishing period of poetry terminated. Among his contemporaries, we may mention, in passing, the epic poets ALBINOVA'NUS author of the These'id, and CORNELIUS SEVE'RUS, who wrote an heroic on the war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. The didactic poets GRATIUS and MANILIUS also flourished in the Augustan age; the former memorable for his poem on hunting, the latter for his "Astronomica."

PROSE WRITERS.

Titus Livius. The last ornament of the Augustan Era is the historian Livy, born at Pata'vium (now Padua) about 59 B.C.-the scion of a noble line that had figured proudly in the annals of the Republic. His was the uneventful life of the scholar, and few particulars of his biography have therefore been preserved. He appears to have begun his career as a rhetorician; to have come to the capital about B.C. 31, for what precise purpose we cannot say, and there to have gained a ready introduction at court. The emperor, already favorably impressed with his ability, is said to have placed at his disposal a suite of rooms in the palace.

Perhaps, as his importunities made the reluctant Virgil the great epic poet of Rome, so Augustus may have stirred the ambition of Livy to become its historian; whether he did or not, we find the rhetorician of Patavium, soon after taking up his abode at the imperial city, entering upon the composition of his "Annals," a work which progressed simultaneously with the Æneid. As the different decades (divisions of ten books)

were completed, the author, after first reading them to Augustus and Mæcenas, published them for the perusal of his countrymen. They at once made his reputation, and became the received authority on the national history, raising Livy during his lifetime, as at the present day, to the rank of the most distinguished historians. The estimation in which they were held may be inferred from the story of Pliny-that a citizen of Cadiz came all the way to Italy merely to see the great writer the whole Roman world was talking about.

For forty years Livy labored on his history. At the time. of his death, which took place in his native town, 17 A.D., he had finished 142 books, covering nearly seven and a half cen-· turies from the founding of Rome. It is supposed that he intended to add eight more, embracing the entire reign of Augustus. Only thirty-five of the original books have been recovered.

The loss of the decades relating to the civil wars is much to be deplored, and it has ever been the hope of scholars that some day the missing parts would be found. Several times has the literary world been thrown into excitement by false rumors of their discovery. Once, we are told, a learned man detected in the parchment covering of a battledoor with which he was playing a page of the favorite historian; but on hastening to the maker of the toy, to rescue the prized manuscript to which it had belonged, he found that all had been utilized in a similar manner. A meagre synopsis of the books that have perished, serves only to make us regret their loss the more keenly.

Livy's "Annals" is a model of elegant historical writing, and a repertory of tales and traditions of early heroism, which have made Roman virtue and prowess the admiration of the world; yet his statements must be taken with many grains of allowance. Not that he wilfully misrepresented, but rather that he trusted too implicitly authorities of doubtful veracity,