Why should I sing the mighty darts
Which fly to wound celestial hearts,
When ah, the song, with sweeter tone,
Can tell the darts that wound my own?
Still be Anacreon, still inspire
The descant of the Teian lyre:
Still let the nectared numbers float
Distilling love in every note!
And when some youth, whose glowing soul
Has felt the Paphian star's control,
When he the liquid lays shall hear,
His heart will flutter to his ear,
And drinking there of song divine,
Banquet on intellectual wine![2]
[1] This hymn to Apollo is supposed not to have been written by Anacreon;
and it is undoubtedly rather a sublimer flight than the Teian wing is
accustomed to soar. But in a poet of whose works so small a proportion has
reached us, diversity of style is by no means a safe criterion. If we knew
Horace but as a satirist, should we easily believe there could dwell such
animation in his lyre? Suidas says that our poet wrote hymns, and this
perhaps is one of them. We can perceive in what an altered and imperfect
state his works are at present, when we find a scholiast upon Horace
citing an ode from the third book of Anacreon.
[2] Here ends the last of the odes in the Vatican MS., whose authority
helps to confirm the genuine antiquity of them all, though a few have
stolen among the number, which we may hesitate in attributing to Anacreon.
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