“A spring there is, where silver waters show, Clear as a glass, the shining sands below; A flowery lotus spreads its arms above, Shades all the banks, and seems itself a grove: Eternal greens the mossy margin grace, Watched by the sylvan genius of the place. Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood, Before my sight a watery virgin stood: She stood and cried,‘O you that love in vain, Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main! There stands a rock, from whose impending steep Apollo’s fane surveys the rolling deep; There injured lovers, leaping from above, Their flames extinguish and forget to love. Hence, Sappho, haste! from high Leucadia throw Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below.’ She spoke, and vanished with the voice—I rise, And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes. I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove: And much I fear; but ah! how much I love! To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon’s hate, And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.” In the “Art of Love,” Ovid again overleaped the bounds of propriety, and threw so brilliant a coloring into his pictures of vice that his readers were fain to linger over them, to enjoy, and to admire, with manifest danger to their own morals. When even a daughter of the imperial line was corrupted by them, Augustus, the professed defender of virtue, felt that it was time to stop the dissemination of such principles, and visited the poet with his displeasure. In consequence of a subsequent and more serious offence, in some way connected with the royal family, but the nature of which we can only conjecture, Ovid suddenly received notice to quit the capital forever, and retire to To’mi, a dreary and desolate village on the Black Sea, A.D. 9. Despite his urgent prayers, the decree of banishment was never revoked. The works of his eight years’ exile are the “Tristia,” or Sorrows, “Letters from Pontus,” and some shorter poems; they prove his genius to have been crushed, his spirit broken. Tomi gave Ovid a grave; even his request to be buried in Italy was refused. The best of Ovid’s works were the “Fasti,” or Roman Calendar, a pleasant almanac in verse, and the “Metamorphoses,” ingenious in both conception and expression. While engaged on the Fasti, which he intended to complete in twelve books, one dedicated to each month, the poet was surprised by the decree of banishment, and left his work unfinished. The Metamorphoses, from which modern writers have largely drawn, gives an account of the transformations of ancient mythology, such as the changing of Io into a heifer, Daphne into a laurel, the sisters of Phaëton into the poplars of the Po, and Atlas into a mountain of stone by the gorgon-head of Perseus. One of the prettiest of these poems relates to the metamorphosis of the ivory statue wrought by Pygmalion, into a living bride, by the goddess of beauty, in answer to the sculptor’s prayer:—