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Rh adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for "the dark red wine:" they might have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:—

Come, Father Bacchus, come! thy bounty fills

All things around; for thee the autumn hills,

Heavy with fruit, blush through their greenery;

In the full vats the vintage foams for thee:

Come, Father Bacchus, come! nor yet refuse

To doff thy buskins, and with noble juice

To stain thy limbs, and tread the grapes with me."

But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second book:—

"Colchian bulls with fiery nostrils never turned Italian field,

Seed of hydra's teeth ne'er sprang in bristling crop of spear and shield;

But thy slopes with heavy corn-stalks and the Massic vine are clad,

There the olive-groves are greenest, and the full-fed herds are glad.

In thy plains is bred the war-horse, tossing high its crest of pride;

Milk-white herds, O fair Clitumnus, bathe them in thy sacred tide—