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- Quamuis digressu ueteris confusus
amici
- laudo tamen, uacuis quod sedem figere
Cumis
- destinet atque unum ciuem donare
Sibyllae.
- ianua Baiarum est et gratum litus amoeni
- secessus. ego uel
Prochytam praepono
Suburae;
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- Grieved though I am to see
the man
depart,
- Who long has shared, and still must share my
heart,
- Yet (when I call my better judgment
home)
- I praise his purpose; to retire from
Rome,
- And give, on
Cumae’s solitary
coast,
- The
Sibyl—one
inhabitant to boast!
- Full on the road to
Baiae,
Cumae lies,
- And many a sweet retreat her shore
supplies—
- Though I prefer even
Prochyta’s
bare strand,
- To the
Subura:—for,
what desert land,
- What wild, uncultured spot, can more
affright,
- Than fires, wide blazing through the gloom of
night,
- Houses, with ceaseless ruin, thundering
down,
- And all the horrours of this hateful
town?
- Where
poets,
while the dogstar glows, rehearse,
- To gasping multitudes, their barbarous
verse!
- Now had my friend, impatient to
depart,
- Consign’d his little all to one
poor
cart:
- For this, without the town, he chose to
wait;
- But stopp’d a moment at the
Conduit -
gate.—
- Here
Numa erst his nightly
visits paid,
- And held high converse with the
Egerian
maid:
- Now the once-hallow’d
fountain, grove, and
fane,
- Are let to
Jews, a wretched,
wandering train,
- Whose furniture’s a basket fill’d
with hay,—
- For every tree is forced a tax to
pay;
- And while the
heaven-born Nine in
exile rove,
- The beggar rents their consecrated
grove!
- Thence slowly winding down the vale, we
view
- The Egerian grots—ah, how unlike the true!
- Nymph of the Spring! More honour’d hadst
thou been,
- If, free from art, an edge of living
green,
- Thy bubbling fount had circumscribed
alone,
- And marble ne’er profaned the native
stone.
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