Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/50

42 and wheat-harvest, drained by the slumber-steeped poppy of Lethe, but yet rotation lightens the labour; only scorn not to soak the dry soil with fattening dung, nor to scatter grimy ashes over the exhausted lands. Thus too the fields find rest in change of crop; nor meanwhile are thanks lost on unploughed land. Often likewise it is well to burn barren fields and consume the light stubble in crackling flame: whether that earth thence conceives secret strength and sustenance, or all her evil is melted away and her useless moisture sweats out in the fire; or that the heat opens more of these ducts and blind pores that carry her juices to the fresh herbage; or rather hardens and binds her gaping veins against fine rain or the fierce sun's mastery or the frostbite of the searching North.

Great service withal he does the fields who breaks their dull clods with the mattock and drags osier hurdles over them, nor from high Olympus does golden Ceres regard him in vain; or he who, raising ridges along the furrowed plain, again turns his plough to break them across, and labours earth incessantly and makes the fields own his sway.

Pray for dripping midsummers and clear winters, O husbandmen; from winter dust the spelt grows strongest, and the field is glad; never does Mysia triumph in such pride of tillage, or Gargarus himself wonder at his harvests. Why tell of him, who, when the seed is cast, follows close over the field and breaks down the lumps of sticky soil?