Page:The Hundred Best Poems (lyrical) in the English language - second series.djvu/129

 All moods.'Tis long since I have seen a man. Once, like the moon, I made

"The ever-shifting currents of the blood According to my humour ebb and flow. I have no men to govern in this wood: That makes my only woe.

"Nay—yet it chafes me that I could not bend One will; nor tame and tutor with mine eye That dull cold-blooded Cæsar.Prythee, friend, Where is Mark Antony?

"The man, my lover, with whom I rode sublime On Fortune's neck: we sat as God by God: The Nil us would have risen before his time And flooded at our nod.

"We drank the Libyan Sun to sleep, and lit Lamps which out-burn'd Canopus.O my life In Egypt! O the dalliance and the wit, The flattery and the strife,

"And the wild kiss, when fresh from war's alarms, My Hercules, my Roman Antony, My mailed Bacchus leapt into my arms, Contented there to die!

"And there he died: and when I heard my name Sigh'd forth with life I would not brook my fear Of the other: with a worm I balk'd his fame. What else was left? look here!" 107