“Can we discern, with all our lore, The path we’re yet to journey o’er? No, no, the walk of life is dark, ’Tis wine alone can strike a spark! Then let me quaff the foamy tide, And through the dance meandering glide; Let me imbibe the spicy breath Of odors chafed to fragrant death, Or from the kiss of love inhale A more voluptuous, richer gale.” * * * * * Of the amatory writers who exhaust rhetoric to express the infinity of kisses which they require from the lips of their mistresses, Catullus takes the lead. In his famous verses to Lesbia (Carm. 5), he says: “Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and a farthing for all the talk of morose old sages! Suns may set and rise again; but we, when once our brief light has set, must sleep through a perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then still another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we shall have made up many thousands, we will confuse the reckoning, so that we ourselves may not know their amount, nor any spiteful person have it in his power to envy us when he knows that our kisses were so many.” Roman superstition recognized an occult and mischievous potency in the sentiment of envy. Moreover, there was a prevalent notion that it excited the envy of the gods to _count_ what gave one pleasure. The following metrical versions of the foregoing are worth a place here. The first is by George Lamb (1821): “Love, my Lesbia, while we live; Value all the cross advice That the surly graybeards give At a single farthing’s price. “Suns that set again may rise; We, when once our fleeting light, Once our day in darkness dies, Sleep in one eternal night. “Give me kisses thousand-fold, Add to them a hundred more; Other thousands still be told, Other hundreds, o’er and o’er. “But, with thousands when we burn, Mix, confuse the sums at last, That we may not blushing learn All that have between us past. “None shall know to what amount Envy’s due for so much bliss; None—for none shall ever count All the kisses we will kiss.” The second is by C. A. Elton, whose translations of the classic poets were first published in 1814: “Let us, my Lesbia, live and love; Though the old should disapprove; Let us rate their saws severe At the worth of a denier. Suns can set beneath the main, And lift their fated, orbs again, But we, when sets our scanted light, Must slumber in perpetual night. Give me, then, a thousand kisses; Add a hundred billing blisses; Give me a thousand kisses more; Then repeat the hundred o’er; Give me other thousand kisses; Give me other hundred blisses; And when thousands now are done, Let us confuse them every one, That we the number cannot know, And none that saw us kissing so Might glut his envious busy spleen By counting o’er the kisses that had been.”