Come hither, pray, O friends! Let me my sorrow tell you. Wordless such loss to bear, my heart indeed endures not: All that the soul downweighs seems to a man less bitter, If to the friendly ear sorrow can be but uttered. Dead is my neighbor's child: dead is my only cow. Comfort has fled from him; fled from me every joying. So do we sorrow, both, reft of our peace each bosom: He that his child is dead--I that my cow is taken. Look you now, friends! how strange ay, and how sad Fate's dealings! I well had spared a child--one cow he well had wanted. Turn things about, thou Death! Less evil seem thy doings. Full is my house--too full: surely is full his cow-house! Death, take his stalls for prey, or choose from out my seven! There have you, Death, full room; less to us too the trouble. Certain the pain's forgot--ay, and forgotten quickly, When, in the greater herd, one little wolf's a robber! What do I murmur thus? Ever is Death one earless. Lost on _him_ good advice, argument on him wasted. Onward he moves, this Death, pallid and wholly blindly. Oftenest he a guest just where his call's least needed. Ah, who can calm my grief; who, pray, shall still my neighbor's? Just as we would not choose, so unto each it happens!-- He who is rich must lose all that means nearest heirship, I, the poor man, O God! stripped of my one possession! Translation through the German by E. Irenæus Stevenson. CATULLUS (84-54 B.C.?) BY J. W. MACKAIL [Illustration: VALERIUS CATULLUS] The last thirty years of the Roman Republic are, alike in thought and action, one of the high-water marks of the world's history. This is the age of Cicero and of Julius Cæsar. This brief period includes the conquest of Gaul, the invasion of Britain, the annexation of the Asiatic monarchies founded by Alexander's marshals; the final collapse of the Roman oligarchy which had subdued the whole known world; the development of the stateliest and most splendid prose that the world has ever seen or is ever likely to see; and lastly, a social life among the Roman upper classes so brilliant, so humane, so intimately known to us from contemporary historians, poets, orators, letter-writers, that we can live in it with as little stretch of imagination as we can live in the England of Queen Anne. Among the foremost figures of this wonderful period is Valerius Catullus, the first of Latin lyric poets, and perhaps the third, alongside of Sappho and Shelley, in the supreme rank of the lyric poets of the world.