Such and divers such reproaches did I heap upon my soul. 
    And my soul in turn made answer:—­“Whoso deems he can control
    Wily love, the same shall lightly gaze upon the stars of heaven
    And declare by what their number overpasses seven times seven. 
    Will I, nill I, I may never from my neck his yoke unloose. 
    So, my friend, a god hath willed it:  he whose plots could outwit Zeus,
    And the queen whose home is Cyprus.  I, a leaflet of to-day,
    I whose breath is in my nostrils, am I wrong to own his sway?”

FRAGMENT PROM THE “BERENICE.”

    Ye that would fain net fish and wealth withal,
      For bare existence harrowing yonder mere,
    To this our Lady slay at even-fall
      That holy fish, which, since it hath no peer
      For gloss and sheen, the dwellers about here
    Have named the Silver Fish.  This done, let down
      Your nets, and draw them up, and never fear
    To find them empty * * * *

EPIGRAMS AND EPITAPHS.

    I.

    Yours be yon dew-steep’d roses, yours be yon
    Thick-clustering ivy, maids of Helicon: 
    Thine, Pythian Paean, that dark-foliaged bay;
    With such thy Delphian crags thy front array. 
    This horn’d and shaggy ram shall stain thy shrine,
    Who crops e’en now the feathering turpentine.

    II.

    To Pan doth white-limbed Daphnis offer here
      (He once piped sweetly on his herdsman’s flute)
    His reeds of many a stop, his barbed spear,
      And scrip, wherein he held his hoards of fruit.

    III.

      Daphnis, thou slumberest on the leaf-strown lea,
        Thy frame at rest, thy springes newly spread
      O’er the fell-side.  But two are hunting thee: 
        Pan, and Priapus with his fair young head
      Hung with wan ivy.  See! they come, they leap
    Into thy lair—­fly, fly,—­shake off the coil of sleep!

    IV.

    For yon oaken avenue, swain, you must steer,
      Where a statue of figwood, you’ll see, has been set: 
    It has never been barked, has three legs and no ear;
      But I think there is life in the patriarch yet. 
    He is handsomely shrined within fair chapel-walls;
      Where, fringed with sweet cypress and myrtle and bay,
    A stream ever-fresh from the rock’s hollow falls,
      And the ringleted vine her ripe store doth display: 
    And the blackbirds, those shrill-piping songsters of spring,
      Wake the echoes with wild inarticulate song: 
    And the notes of the nightingale plaintively ring,
      As she pours from her dun throat her lay sweet and strong. 
    Sitting there, to Priapus, the gracious one, pray
      That the lore he has taught me I soon may unlearn: 
    Say I’ll give him a kid, and in case he says nay
      To this offer, three victims to him will I burn;
    A kid, a fleeced ram, and a lamb sleek and fat;
    He will listen, mayhap, to my prayers upon that.