Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/21

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Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow my lady's pet, whom she loved more than her own eyes; for honey-sweet he was, and knew his mistress as well as a girl knows her very mother. Nor would he stir from her bosom, but hopping now here, now there, still chirped to his mistress alone. Now he goes along the dark road, thither whence they say no one returns. But curse upon you, cursed shades of Orcus, which devour all pretty things! such a pretty sparrow have you taken away from me. Ah, how sad! Ah, poor little bird! All because of you my lady's darling eyes are heavy and red with weeping.

The galley you see, my friends, says that she was once the fleetest of ships, and that there was never any timber afloat whose speed she was not able to pass, whether she would fly with oar-blades or with canvas. And this (says she) the shore of the blustering Adriatic does not deny, nor the Cyclad islands and famous Rhodes and the wild Thracian Propontis, nor the gloomy gulf of Pontus, where she who has since been a galley was formerly a leafy forest: for in the height of Cytorus she often rustled with talking leaves. Pontic Amastris and Cytorus