How many kisses will suffice,
You ask me, Lesbia,--ask a lover!
Go bid him count the sands;--discover,
Even to a very grain precise,
How many lie in heaps, or hover,
When gusty winds the sand hills stir
About the benzoin-bearing plain,
Between Jove's Cyrenean fane,
And Battus' sacred sepulchre.
How many stars, in stillest night,
On loving thefts look down approving,--
So many kisses should requite
Catullus, ah too madly loving.--
Ye curious eyes, be closed in slumber,
That would be spies upon our wooing,
That there be none to note the number,
Nor tongue to babble of our doing.
GRATIAN.--Read that last again--for "my eyes," I confess, were not as
"curious" as they should have been, and were just closing as you came to
the wooing.