The remaining poems are in the old spirit, but are somewhat mournful echoes of the past. They remind us of the robin's winter song--"Hark to him weeping," say the country folk, as they listen to the music which retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now "come to bless thy worshipper"; but "leave an old heart made callous by fifty years, and seek some younger votary." There is an ode to Spring. Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message is that change and death attend all human hopes and cares. Like an army defeated, the snow has retreated; the Graces and the Nymphs can dance unclad in the soft warm air. But summer will thrust out spring, autumn summer, then dull winter will come again; will come to the year, will come to you and me. Not birth nor eloquence nor virtue can save from Minos' judgement seat; like Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, like all the great ones of the earth, we shall soon be nameless shades and a poor pinch of dust. More of the old buoyant glee comes back in a festal invitation to one Virgilius, not the poet. There is a ring of Tom Moore in Sir Theodore Martin's rendering of it. * * * * * On the young grass reclined, near the murmur of fountains, The shepherds are piping the song of the plains, And the god who loves Arcady's purple-hued mountains, The god of the flocks, is entranced by their strains. * * * * * To the winds with base lucre and pale melancholy! In the flames of the pyre these, alas! will be vain; Mix your sage ruminations with glimpses of folly, 'Tis delightful at times to be somewhat insane! There follows a savage assault on one Lyce, an ancient beauty who had lost her youthful charms, but kept up her youthful airs: Where now that beauty? where those movements? where That colour? what of her, of her is left, Who, breathing Love's own air, Me of myself bereft! Poor Lyce! spared to raven's length of days; That youth may see, with laughter and disgust, A firebrand, once ablaze, Now smouldering in grey dust.