Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/51



devour the way with haste, though his fair lady should call him back a thousand times, and throwing both her arms round his neck beg him to delay. She now, if a true tale is brought to me, dotes on him with passionate love. For since she read the beginning of his Lady of Dindymus, ever since then, poor girl, the fires have been wasting her inmost marrow. I can feel for you, maiden more scholarly than the Sapphic muse; for Caecilius has indeed made a lovely beginning to his Magna Mater.

Chronicle of Volusius, dirty waste paper, discharge a vow on behalf of my love; for she vowed to holy Venus and to Cupid that if I were restored to her love and ceased to dart fierce iambics, she would give to the lamefooted god the choicest writings of the worst of poets, to be burnt with wood from some accursed tree: and the lady saw that these were the worst poems ' that she was vowing to the merry

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gods in pleasant sport. Now therefore, O thou whom 1° the blue sea bare, who inhabitest holy Idalium and open Urii, who dwellest in Ancona and reedy Cnidus and in Amathus and in Golgi, and in Dyrrhachium the meeting-place of all Hadria, enter the vow as received and duly paid, so surely as it is not out of taste nor inelegant. Meantime come you here into the fire, full of rusticity and clumsiness, chronicle of Volusius, dirty waste paper. °

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