Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/62

54 Nisus is in sight and Scylla pays the debt of that purple hair: wheresoever her pinions cleave the thin air in flight, lo, hostile, fierce, loud-swooping down the wind, Nisus is upon her; where Nisus mounts into the wind, her hurrying pinions cleave the thin air in flight. Therewithal rooks repeat three or four times a clear thin-throated cry, and often where they sit aloft, happy in some strange unwonted delight, chatter together among the leaves, glad when rains are over to look to their little brood and darling nests once again; not, to my thinking, that their instinct is divine or their dower of fate a larger foresight into nature: but when the weather veers about and the saturated air shifts, and under dripping skies of the south what was rare but now condenses and what was dense expands, their temper changes countenance, and other motions stir within their breasts than stirred while the clouds drove on before the wind; hence the birds make such chorus in the fields, and the cattle are glad, and the rooks caw in exultation.

If indeed thou wilt regard the hastening sun and the moon's ordered sequences, never will an hour of the morrow deceive thee, nor wilt thou be taken in the wiles of a cloudless night. When the moon first gathers her returning fires, if she clasp a dark mist in her dim crescent, drenching rain will be in store for husbandman and seafarer; but if a maiden flush suffuse her face, wind is coming: wind always flushes the gold of the moon: while if at her fourth rising (for