Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/102

90 the wars safe and sound, Conon discovered it a constellation in the firmament. He had returned victorious; the lock had been reft from its mistress's head with that resistless steel to which ere then far sturdier powers had succumbed—

Need we suggest the parallel from Pope?—

The tress proceeds to describe her passage through the air, and her eventual accession to the breast of Venus, thence to be transferred to an assigned position among the stars. A high destination, as the poem makes Berenice's hair admit, yet one (and here adulation takes its finest flight) which it would cheerfully forego to be once more lying on its mistress's head:—