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ELEGY XV

HE BIDS FAREWELL TO HIS WANTON MUSE, TO COURT ONE, MORE AUSTERE.

SEEK a new Poet, mother of tender Loves. I'm now rounding the last mark with my elegies. Those songs which I, a child of the Pelignian countryside, have written, have been a delight to me and they have not put me to shame. If it's anything to boast about, my title of Knight is an old ancestral one. I'm not a parvenu of the latest war. Mantua delights in Virgil, Verona in Catullus; I shall be called the glory of the Pelignians, of the people who so loved freedom that they did not hesitate to fight and die for it when Rome was menaced by confederate hosts. Some day when he sees Sulmo of many streams, close girdled by her narrow ramparts, the traveller will exclaim, "Little town, for all thy littleness, I'll call thee great, because thou wast able to produce so great a poet."

Lovely boy, and thou, Venus, his mother, pluck from my fields your golden standards, The god of the hornèd brow, Lyæeus, hath struck me with a mightier thyrsus, and bids me urge my steeds over a wider plain. Farewell, ye dainty elegies, and thou, my kindly Muse, farewell; when I am gone, my work will still live on.


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