Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/66

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far of tillage of the fields and stars in the sky: now of thee, Bacchus, will I sing, and with thee no less of woodland copses and the slowly waxing olive growth. Hither, lord of the winepress; here all is full of thy bounties, for thee the field flowers, heavy with tendrils of autumn, and the brimming vintage foams; come hither, lord of the winepress, by my side pluck off thy buskins and dye thy bared ankles in the new wine.

First of all, Nature is manifold in the birth of trees. For some with no human urging come at their own will and spread wide by plain and winding river, like the soft osier and tough broom, the poplar, and pale willow-beds with their silvery leafage; and some rise from seed they drop, like the towering chestnuts, and Jove's winter-oak, lordliest of leafage in the woodland, and those oaks that Greece holds oracular. Others, like the elm and cherry, multiply from the root in serried undergrowth; and the tiny bay-tree on Parnassus springs beneath her mother's vast shade. These ways are of Nature's ancient gift; in these wear their green all the tribes of forest and underwood and sacred grove.

Others there are, which experience has found out for itself on the way. One tears suckers from their mother's tender stem and sets them in trenches; one plunges in the soil stocks and cross-cleft billets and sharpened stakes from the core: