No more my darling passes me with silent recognition, Nor can she sit unmoved while I outpour my tender vow. I wish that I had sooner realized this blest condition; ’Tis pouring living water on a dead man’s ashes now. In vain did others seek my love, in vain they called upon her, She leaned her head upon my breast, was kind as girl could be. Of conquered Parthians talk no more, I’ve gained a nobler honor, For she’ll be spoils, and leaders, and triumphal car to me. Light of my life! say, shall my bark reach shore with gear befitting, Or, dashed amid the breakers, with her cargo run aground? With thee it lies: but if, perchance, through fault of my committing, Thou giv’st me o’er, before thy door let my cold corse be found.” CRANSTOUN. =Ovid= (43 B.C.-17 A.D.).—Publius Ovidius Na’so, the last of the Augustan poets, was a knight of Sulmo, an ancient Samnite town in the eastern part of Italy. Designed for the legal profession, he was sent to Rome to be educated; but the writing of verses was more congenial than rhetorical studies; and an eminent critic of the day, on hearing one of his early declamations, described it as “nothing else than poetry out of metre.” After the death of an elder son, his father consented that Publius should follow the bent of his own inclinations, and the poet went abroad to study in Greece and travel in Asia Minor. Returning to Rome, he began his literary career as the glory of the Augustan age was beginning to fade. For twenty-two years Ovid wasted his talents on the composition of licentious love-poems. In the “Loves” (Amo’res), the earliest of his works, one Corinna is addressed throughout. The hearty reception with which these loose songs met at Rome is a sad comment on the degeneracy of the public taste and morals. They were followed by the “Hero’ides,” a collection of twenty-one imaginary love-letters, inscribed by the heroines of the past to their absent or unfaithful lords—an original idea with Ovid. Penelope indicts an epistle to Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Sappho to Phaon, etc. In the one last named, translated by Pope, the Lesbian poetess informs the youth of her resolve to take the Lover’s Leap.