Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/157



I stole a kiss from you, honey-sweet Juventius, while you were playing, a kiss sweeter than sweet ambrosia. But not unpunished; for I remember how for more than an hour I hung impaled on the top of the gallows tree, while I was excusing myself to you, yet could not with all my tears take away ever so little from your anger.... Besides, you made haste to deliver your unhappy lover to " angry Love, and to torture him in every manner, so that that kiss, changed from ambrosia, was now more bitter than bitter hellebore. Since then you impose this penalty on my unlucky love, henceforth I will never steal any kisses.

Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken your own self away from me — alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me! Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our f at l ie £LJ? ave been handed down -^a sowowful tribute^-for^a funeral sacrifice; take them, wet with many tears of a brother, and for ever, my brother, hail and farewell!