Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves,
While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves?
Wilt thou 'mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise,
And, a new star, illume thy native skies?
Scorpius, e'en now, each shrinking claw confines,
And more than half his heaven to thee resigns.
Where'er thy reign (for not if hell invite
To wield the sceptre of eternal night,
Ne'er would such lust of dire dominion move
Thee, Cæsar, to resign the realm of Jove:
Though vaunting Greece extol th' Elysian plain,
Whence weeping Ceres wooes her child in vain)
Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide,
O'er the rude swain's uncertain path preside;
Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth,
And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth."
The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over—advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,—squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,—he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The
