’Tis our Office-badges we see each year Candidates praying, buying leave to wear— Ungrateful burden—and worse, after all, Not be licensed to be the people’s thrall! The Danaids again; who could in truth Believe that in despite of bridal ruth Fifty girls, save one, would shed forth a flood, At their father’s dictate, of kindred blood, Or, if so, have paid for the deed in Hell By drawing, in cracked pitchers, from a well? Myth ill planned; but ponder it he who feeds Cross-grained diseases of the soul, ill weeds, That usurp life’s field, and divert the gaze From joys that might be his for many days, To outbursts as self-mocking as the freak Of pouring water into jars that leak. Cerberus too, the Furies, and the gloom Steaming from black Cocytus, and the boom Of Tartarus, flames and shrieks, horrors seen By none but bards. They never could have been; Yet such were, are, will be, at our own hearth, So long as wrong is rampant on the Earth. Thriving guilt is haunted. As if to mock Its rise, is hurled from the Tarpeian rock, Shivers in dungeons, is scourged, branded, all To stamp sin’s end, and emphasize pride’s fall. If Justice often lags, alas, to find Fit chastisement for crime, and may seem blind, Conscience is keener-sighted; and its goad And whip spare not; no mercy for the load. How cheered would be the sinner could he think Dying cleared accounts; he had but to sink In death, and the weight dropped? Part of his curse Is that fancy paints future torments worse. The Wise assure him Hell is not; in vain; Life, his, is Hell; Eternity of pain. To wrongdoers and wronged too brief a space Human life has seemed to avenge a race On heinous crimes against it; hence rose Dis, Balanced by Elysian fields of bliss. But you, the Multitude, why are you sad That life is short, you, neither good, nor bad? Is it not for an ordinary man Audacious to complain how short his span, When, Ancus, with his royal work to do, Closed his eyes on light, younger than are you? Other kings, and lords many, in the pride Of life, who ruled great nations since have died. By a sudden treason He breathed his last Who paved a road by which his legions passed O’er the sea’s salt pools, scornful of the roar As foot and horsemen crossed from shore to shore. Scipio, thunderbolt of war, at whom Carthage shuddered, messenger of her doom, Gave his bones without protest to the grave As much of course as if a scullion slave. Did they who trained the energies of mind To serve, and exalt, or please, humankind, Pioneered in the Sciences to arm Against gross Dulness, and by Arts to charm, Repine when the summons came to leave off, And not echo it with a glad “Enough”! Ministers of the Muses, with the rest, Peerless Homer, by all their king confessed, Raised not a single murmur, did not plead For one song more before they joined the dead.