None waste their strength by amorous toils sub
No pangs of labour renovate the brood:
But from sweet herbs they gather all their race; Kings, and their courts, and waxen realms replace. Oft 'mid hard rocks their wandering wings they bruise,
And oft their lives beneath the burden lose;
Such their fond zeal that every flower explores,
And glorious strife to swell their golden stores.
Hence, though harsh fate, when sev'n fleet sum-
mers en,
At once their labours and their lives suspend, 240
The race and realm from age to age remain,
And time but lengthens with new links the chain.
Not Lydia's sons, nor Parthia's peopled shore,
Mede or Egyptian thus their king adore.
He lives, and pours through all th' accordant soul;
He dies, and by his death dissolves the whole :
They, they themselves their wondrous fabric tear,
Scatter their combs, and waste in wild despair:
He guards their works, his look deep rev'rence
draws;
Crowds swarm on crowds, and hum their loud ap
Bear 'mid the press of battle on their wing,
And, proud to perish, die arcund their king.
Hence, to the bee some sages have assign'd
A portion of the God, and heavenly mind;
For God goes forth, and spreads throughout the
whole,
Heaven, earth, and sea, the universal soul;
Each at its birth, from him all beings share,
Both man and brute, the breath of vital air;
243 Lydia, a region of Asia Minor. Parthia, a region of Asia, whose people are reported to have been so submissive to thei xing as to kiss his foot, and to touch the ground with their mouths on approaching him.-Martyn.
To him return, and, loosed from earthly chain,
Fly whence they sprung, and rest in God again, 260
Spurn at the grave, and, fearless of decay,
Dwell in high heaven, and star th' ethereal way.
But if thy search their sacred realm explore,
And from their treasures draw the honey'd store,
With spirted water damp their ready wing,
And veil'd in clouds of smoke elude the sting.
The swarm twice labours, twice the harvest swells,
First when fair Pleias the scorn'd sea repels,
And beams o'er earth, or down th' aerial steep,
When her pale ray sinks mournful in the deep. 270
The injured swarms with rage insatiate glow,
Barb every shaft and poison every blow,
Deem life itself to vengeance well resign'd,
Die on the wound, and leave their stings behind.
But if bleak winter's dearth thy fears create, 275
Or rouse thy pity for their ruin'd state,
With thymy odours scent their smoking halls,
And pare th' unpeopled cells that load their walls.
There oft, unseen, insidious lizards prey,
The beetle there that flies the light of day,
There feasts th' unbidden drone, there ring th' alarms
Of hornets battling with unequal arms,
Dire gnaws the moth, and o'er their portals spread
The spider watches her aerial thread.
The more exhausted, still the more they strive 285
To renovate the race, and store the hive;
Contending myriads urge exhaustless powers,
Fill every cell, and crowd the comb with flowers.
259 According to Plutarch it was the opinion of Pythagoras and Plate that the soul did not die, but that when it left the Dody it returned to the kindred soul of the universe. The Stoics thought the souls of the ignorant perished with their bodies, and that those of the wise endured till the conflagration. Democritus and Epicurus were of opinion that the soul and body died together; Pythagoras and Plato held that the irrational part perished, but not the rational; the soul being (though not God himself) yet the work of the eternal God.-Martyn.
But (since dread ills both bees and man molest)
If e'er disease the languid hive infest,
A horrid leanness the dread sign displays,
Their vigour wastes away, their hue decays:
The dead are carried forth, and sad and slow
The long procession swells the pomp of wo;
Or round the doors they cling with pensile feet, 295
Or all lie loitering in their dark retreat,
Their drooping pinions, weak with famine, close,
Or, shrunk with cold, their torpid limbs repose.
Then long-drawn hums wind on from cell to cell,
Like gales that murmur down the woodland dell, 300
Or ebbing waves that roll along the shore,
Or flames that in the furnace inly roar.
Then round the hive in many a smoky wreath
Let burning galbanum rich incense breathe,
Through reedy channels pour the honey'd flood, 305
Lure their coy taste, and court with tempting food.
There the dried rose and pounded galls combine,
There by slow fires matur'd the thicken'd wine,
There the strong centaury's reviving pow'r,
The Psythian grape, and thyme's odorous flow'r. 310
In fields there grows a flow'r of pastoral fame,
Amellus, so the shepherds call its name;
Sprung from one root its stalk profusely spread,
A golden circle glitters on its head,
But many a leaf with purple violet crown'd
Throws a soft shade its yellow disk around.
Tho' rough to taste, it wreaths with flow'rs the fane,
And tempts by Mella's stream the shepherd swain.
Seeth in rich wine its roots, and, oft renew'd,
High pile before their gates th' alluring food. 320
But should the nation fail, none left alive
To rear the brood and renovate the hive;
309 This herb was so called from the centaur Chiron, who was said to have been cured by that herb of a wound accidentally inflicted by an arrow of Hercules.-Martyn.
312 The plant here described is the aster Atticus, or purple Italian starwort.-Martyn.
Now shall my song, 'tis now the time, explain
The great discovery of th' Arcadian swain;
How art creates, and can at will restore
Swarms from the slaughter'd bull's corrupted gore.
My song at large the legend shall embrace,
And to its fountain-head the whole retrace.
By bless'd Canopus, where th' exulting land
Sees the vast Nile her stagnate bed expand,
And painted galleys float the fields around;
And where, nigh quiver'd Persia's neighbouring
bound,
The flood's dark slime from tawny India glides, Green Egypt feeds and parts its seven-mouth'd
All on this art rely. Provide a place,
Where four close walls a low-pitch'd roof embrace,
And from each wind that, fourfold, heaven divides,
Through adverse lights where day obliquely glides,
There drag a bullock, on whose threat'ning brow
His horns, a two years' crescent, aim the blow. 340
In vain his struggling limbs their power oppose,
While the strong hinds his mouth and nostrils close,
And bruising, blow by blow, the mass within,
Crush the burst entrails through th' unbroken skin.
And there immured, beneath his carcass spread 345
Thyme, and the recent casia's leafy bed.
329 Canopus is the west angle of the triangular Delta of Egypt: Pelusium is the east angle, where it presses on Persia (including under that name the countries conquered by Cyrus and Cambyses). Canopus, so called from the pilot of Menelaus who died there: called Pellæan, from its vicinity to Alexandria, founded by Alexander, born at Pella in Macedonia.-Stawell.
339 Varro says that the bees are called bull-born (Bovyovai) because they proceed from putrid oxen. In the fourteenth chap ter of Judges we read that Samson, after having rent a lion "turned aside to see the carcass of the lion, and behold there was a swarm of bees, and honey in the carcass of the lign." The mother bee chooses putrid bodies to lay her eggs in, that the fermenting juices may help to hatch then.-MartyStawell.
Be these prepared, when zephyrs first impel
The vernal water's undulating swell,
Ere flowrets blush on earth's enamell'd breast,
Or swallows twitter in their rafter'd nest.
Meanwhile the moisture with fermenting strife
Boils in the tender bones, and teems with life;
First on the sight, all wondrous to behold,
Forms without feet a shapeless growth unfold,
Now buzz upon the wing, and burst amain,
Countless as drops from summer's streaming rain,
Or arrows whizzing from the Parthian bow
That, preluding the fight, o'ercloud the foe.
Say, Muse, what god this art to mortals brought, Or man first practised, by experience taught? From Tempe's vale when Aristæus fled, His swarms by long disease and famine dead, At Peneus' fount he stood, and, bow'd with wo, Breathed his deep murmurs to the nymph below: Cyrene! thou, whom these fair springs revere, 365 The sorrows of thy son, O mother! hear;
Why (such thy boast), if heaven my lineage claim,
And Phoebus grace me with a father's name,
Why didst thou bring this baleful birth to light,
Why lost thy love, why urge to heaven my flight?
E'en the frail honours of this earthly state,
Scarce wrung by labour from reluctant fate,
Vain boast of cultured fruit and tended kine,
These, parent goddess, I, thy son, resign.
Haste, thou thyself, my prosperous woods up-
Burn my full stalls, destroy my ripening fruit,
63 The river Peneus rises in Pindus, a mountain of Thessaly, and flows through the vale of Tempe.
365 Virgil makes Cyrene the daughter of Peneus; but Pindar, in the ninth Pythian ode, makes her the daughter of Hypseus, king of the Lapithæ, son of the Naiad Creusa, by Peneus. Her delight was to hunt wild beasts. Apollo was enamoured of her, and carried her into Africa, where she was delivered of Aristaus and gave her name to the celebrated city Cyrene.-Martyn.
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