Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/98

90 mead, with the glimmer of the morning star let us haste to the chilly countryside while morning is fresh and the grass frosty-white, and the dew on the tender herbage sweetest to the cattle. Thereafter, when the fourth hour in heaven has gathered thirst and the note of the shrill tree-crickets pierces the copses, by wells or by deep pools I will bid the flocks drink the wave that runs in troughs of ilex, but in the noonday heats seek some shady dell, where Jove's great oak, massy and old, stretches his giant boughs, or where, dark with many an ilex, broods the sacred shadow of the grove: then once more offer them the thin runlets and feed them once more about set of sun, when cool evening allays the air and now the dewy moonlight revives the lawns, and the kingfisher is loud on the shore and the warbler in the thickets.

Why pursue to thee in verse the shepherds of Libya, why their pastures and the scattered roofs of the huts that are their home? Often daylong and nightlong and the whole month unbroken the flock goes grazing for lonely leagues without a dwelling; so wide stretches the plain. The African herdsman carries with him all his wealth, his house and household god, his weapons and Amyclaean dog and Cretan quiver; even as the valiant Roman in his ancestral arms, when he speeds his march beneath a cruel burden, and the column halts and the camp is pitched beside the surprised foe.

But not so where the tribes of Scythia border the Maeotic wave and the yellow Danube rolls