Page:Odes and Carmen Saeculare.djvu/182



Or if a graver note thou love, With Phœbus' cittern and his lyre.

followed Horace's sense, not his words. I believe, with Ritter, that the alternative is between the pipe as accompanying the vox acuta, and the cithara or lyre as accompanying the vox gravis. Horace has specified the vox acuta, and left the vox gravis to be inferred; I have done just the reverse.

In this and the two following stanzas I have paraphrased Horace, with a view to bring out what appears to be his sense. There is, I think, a peculiar force in the word fabulosæ, standing as it does at the very opening of the stanza, in close connection with me, and thus bearing the weight of all the intervening words till the very end, where its noun, palumbes, is introduced at last. Horace says in effect, "I, too, like other poets, have a legend of my infancy." Accordingly I have thrown the gossip of the country-side into the form of an actual speech. Whether I am justified in heightening the marvellous by making the stock-doves actually crown the child, instead of merely laying branches upon him, I am not so sure; but something more seems to be meant than the covering of leaves, which the Children in the Wood, in our own legend, receive from the robin.

Loves the leafy growth  Of Lycia next his native wood.

Some of my predecessors seem hardly to distinguish between the Lyciæ dumeta and the natalem silvam of Delos, Apollo's attachment to both of which warrants the two titles Delius et Patareus. I knew no better way of marking