RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.--EARLY POEMS.
Availing himself of the amnesty proclaimed by the conquerors, Horace
found his way back to Rome. His father was dead; how long before is not
known. If the little property at Venusia had remained unsold, it was of
course confiscated. When the lands of men, like Virgil, who had taken no
active part in the political conflicts of the day, were being seized to
satisfy the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery, Horace's paternal acres
were not likely to escape. In Rome he found himself penniless. How to
live was the question; and, fortunately for literature, "chill penury"
did not repress, but, on the contrary, stimulated his "noble rage."
"Bated in spirit, and with pinions clipped,
Of all the means my father left me stripped,
Want stared me in the face, so then and there
I took to scribbling verse in sheer despair."
Despoiled of his means, and smarting with defeat, Horace was just in the
state of mind to strike vigorously at men and manners which he did not
like. Young, ardent, constitutionally hot in temper, eager to assert,
amid the general chaos of morals public and private, the higher
principles of the philosophic schools from which he had so recently
come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a man of
cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a luxurious
city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet scarcely
valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the besetting
temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write it in a
merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15),
"In youth's pleasant spring-time,
The shafts of my passion at random I flung,
And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme,
I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung."
Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; so seductive
to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. But there came a
day, and it came soon, when Horace, saw that triumphs gained in this way
were of little value, and when he was anxious that his friends should
join with him in consigning his smart and scurril lines (_celeres et
criminosos Iambos_) to oblivion. The _amende_ for some early lampoon
which he makes in the Ode just quoted, though ostensibly addressed to
a lady who had been its victim, was probably intended to cover a wider
field.
Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is bought
dearly at the cost of lifelong enmities and many after-regrets. That
Horace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear,
both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this class and
period which survive. Some of these have no value, except as showing how
badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously the better feeling
and better taste of his riper years led him to avoid that most worthless
form of satire which attacks where rejoinder is impossible, and
irritates the temper but cannot possibly amend the heart. In others, the
lash is applied with no less justice than vigour, as in the following
invective, the fourth of the Epodes:--
"Such hate as nature meant to be
'Twixt lamb and wolf I feel for thee,
Whose hide by Spanish scourge is tanned,
And legs still bear the fetter's brand!
Though of your gold you strut so vain,
Wealth cannot change the knave in grain.
How! see you not, when striding down
The Via Sacra [1]in your gown
Good six ells wide, the passers there
Turn on you with indignant stare?
'This wretch,' such gibes your ear invade,
'By the Triumvirs' [2] scourges flayed,
Till even the crier shirked his toil,
Some thousand acres ploughs of soil
Falernian, and with his nags
Wears out the Appian highway's flags;
Nay, on the foremost seats, despite
Of Otho, sits and apes the knight.
What boots it to despatch a fleet
So large, so heavy, so complete,
Against a gang of rascal knaves,
Thieves, corsairs, buccaneers, and slaves,
If villain of such vulgar breed
Is in the foremost rank to lead?'"
[1] The Sacred Way, leading to the Capitol, a favourite lounge.
[2] When a slave was being scourged, under the orders of the
Triumviri Capitales, a public crier stood by, and proclaimed the
nature of his crime.
Modern critics may differ as to whom this bitter infective was aimed at,
but there could have been no doubt on that subject in Rome at the time.
And if, as there is every reason to conclude, it was levelled at Sextus
Menas, the lines, when first shown about among Horace's friends, must
have told with great effect, and they were likely to be remembered long
after the infamous career of this double-dyed traitor had come to a
close. Menas was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and a trusted officer
of his son Sextus. [Footnote: Shakespeare has introduced him in "Antony
and Cleopatra," along with Menecrates and Varrius, as "friends to Sextus
Pompeius."] He had recently (B.C. 38) carried over with him to Augustus
a portion of Pompey's fleet which was under his command, and betrayed
into his hands the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. For this act of
treachery he was loaded with wealth and honours; and when Augustus,
next year, fitted out a naval expedition against Sextus Pompeius,
Menas received a command. It was probably lucky for Horace that this
swaggering upstart, who was not likely to be scrupulous as to his means
of revenge, went over the very next year to his former master, whom he
again abandoned within a year to sell himself once more to Augustus.
That astute politician put it out of his power to play further tricks
with the fleet, by giving him a command in Pannonia, where he was
killed, B.C. 36, at the siege of Siscia, the modern Sissek.
Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a
writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his
models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully--for
bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man--he showed
in other compositions signs of the true poetic spirit, which afterwards
found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his Odes. To
this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from internal
evidence, appears to have been written B.C. 40, when the state of Italy,
convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill him with despair.
Horace had frequent occasion between this period and the battle of
Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the long struggle for
supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his countrymen against
the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray, which might have
been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and spreading the lustre
of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this poem written when the
tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian campaign had arrived in
Rome,--the reduction of the town of Perusia by famine, and the massacre
of from two to three hundred prisoners, almost all of equestrian or
senatorial rank,--we can well understand the feeling under which the
poem is written.
TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE.
Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn,
And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne,
That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands,
Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands,
Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern,
Nor the faithless Allobrogian, who still for change doth yearn.
Ay, what Gennania's blue-eyed youth quelled not with ruthless sword,
Nor Hannibal by our great sires detested and abhorred,
We shall destroy with impious hands imbrued in brother's gore,
And wild beasts of the wood shall range our native land once more.
A foreign foe, alas! shall tread The City's ashes down,
And his horse's ringing hoofs shall smite her places of renown,
And the bones of great Quirinus, now religiously enshrined,
Shall be flung by sacrilegious hands to the sunshine and the wind.
And if ye all from ills so dire ask how yourselves to free,
Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily,
No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspired
The stout Phocaeans when from their doomed city they retired,
Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as a
prey
To the wild boar and the ravening wolf; [1] so we, in our dismay,
Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go,
Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow.
How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should we
Not seize the happy auspices, and boldly put to sea?
But let us swear this oath;--"Whene'er, if e'er shall come the time,
Rocks upwards from the deep shall float, return shall not be crime;
Nor we be loath to back our sails, the ports of home to seek,
When the waters of the Po shall lave Matinum's rifted peak.
Or skyey Apenninus down into the sea be rolled,
Or wild unnatural desires such monstrous revel hold,
That in the stag's endearments the tigress shall delight,
And the turtle-dove adulterate with the falcon and the kite,
That unsuspicious herds no more shall tawny lions fear,
And the he-goat, smoothly sleek of skin, through the briny deep
career!"
This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay,
Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away,
Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul;
The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll.
Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er,
And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore!
The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles,
To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles!
Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves,
And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all her
leaves;
Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue,
And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew;
Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rills
Come dancing down with tinkling feet from the sky-dividing hills;
There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word,
And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd.
There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make,
Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake;
There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star
With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar.
Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rains
By watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate the plains,
Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty clods,
So kindly blends the seasons there the King of all the Gods.
That shore the Argonautic bark's stout rowers never gained,
Nor the wily she of Colchis with step unchaste profaned;
The sails of Sidon's galleys ne'er were wafted to that strand,
Nor ever rested on its slopes Ulysses' toilworn band:
For Jupiter, when he with brass the Golden Age alloyed,
That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed;
With brass and then with iron he the ages seared, but ye,
Good men and true, to that bright home arise and follow me!
[1] The story of the Phocaeans is told by Herodotus (Ch. 165). When
their city was attacked by Harpagus, they retired in a body to make
way for the Persians, who took possession of it. They subsequently
returned, and put to the sword the Persian garrison which had been
left in it by Harpagus. "Afterwards, when this was accomplished,
they pronounced terrible imprecations on any who should desert the
fleet; besides this, they sunk a mass of molten iron, and swore
that they would never return to Phocaea until it should appear
again."
This poem, Lord Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth in
its defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptive passages
is in marked contrast to the terseness of description which Horace
studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in its general
tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance of lyrical art. On
the other hand, it has all the warmth of genuine passion, and in sheer
vigour of composition Horace has rarely excelled it."
The idea of the Happy Isles, referred to in the poem, was a familiar one
with the Greek poets. They became in time confounded with the Elysian
fields, in which the spirits of the departed good and great enjoyed
perpetual rest. It is as such that Ulysses mentions them in Tennyson's
noble monologue:--
"It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down,
It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."
These islands were supposed to be in the far west, and were probably the
poetical amplification of some voyager's account of the Canaries or
of Madeira. There has always been a region beyond the boundaries of
civilisation to which the poet's fancy has turned for ideal happiness
and peace. The difference between ancient and modern is, that material
comforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of the ancient,
while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chief elements in the
modern picture:--
"Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadth of Tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the
crag; Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree,
Summer Isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea."
To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few years
later in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life and its
innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which was embodied by
Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as the production of a
boy of eleven, beginning
"Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound."
With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of
Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country
and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low
and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of over-excitement;
no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely and uneventful
life which the country offers, or to find that, for him at least, its
quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, at all out of
keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poem on this
ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms of a rural
life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to his moneybags
and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrine with him,
which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, that everybody
envies his neighbour's pursuits--until he tries them.
ALPHIUS.
Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
Tills the few acres, which his father tilled,
Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;
The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars,
Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas;
He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars,
Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze.
The tender vine-shoots, budding into life,
He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed,
Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife,
And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;
Or in some valley, up among the hills,
Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine,
Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills,
Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;
Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land
Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned,
Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand
Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;
Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed,
A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee,
Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside,
Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree.
Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest,
Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof;
Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best,
On grassy turf of close elastic woof.
And streams the while glide on with murmurs low,
And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep,
And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow,
And with their noise invite to gentle sleep.
But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds
Scatters its biting snows with angry roar,
He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds
Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;
Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare,
In filmy net with bait delusive stored,
Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare,
Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board.
Who amid joys like these would not forget
The pangs which love to all its victims bears,
The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret,
And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?
But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,
The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,
Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride
Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills,
Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old
Against the coming of her wearied lord,
And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold,
Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;
And bringing forth from her well-tended store
A jar of wine, the vintage of the year,
Spreads an unpurchased feast,--oh then, not more
Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer,
Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char,
If ever to our bays the winter's blast
Should drive them in its fury from afar;
Nor were to me a welcomer repast
The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe,
Than olives newly gathered from the tree,
That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe,
Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea,
Or mallows wholesome for the body's need,
Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal day
In offering to the guardian gods to bleed,
Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey.
What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep,
Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come;
To see the wearied oxen, as they creep,
Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home!
Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth,
To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth,
Beguile the evening with their simple mirth,
And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!
Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent
Upon a country life, called in amain
The money he at usury had lent;--
But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again.
In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that
Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate picture
of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched closely
the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at a later
date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of the most
delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of contrasting
their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of their life, with
the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city life of Rome. Thus,
in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6), after painting with a
few masterly strokes what the matrons and the fast young ladies of the
imperial city had become, it was not from such as these, he continues,
that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the seas with Carthaginian gore,
overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and direful Hannibal," concluding
in words which contrast by their suggestive terseness at the same time
that they suggest comparison with the elaborated fulness of the epode
just quoted:--
"But they, of rustic warriors wight
The manly offspring, learned to smite
The soil with Sabine spade,
And faggots they had cut, to bear
Home from the forest, whensoe'er
An austere mother bade;
"What time the sun began to change
The shadows through the mountain range,
And took the yoke away
From the o'erwearied oxen, and
His parting car proclaimed at hand
The kindliest hour of day."
Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment
(Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind,
stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pity
and terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in a
similar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of the
sorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family--his rank being clearly
indicated by the reference to his purple _toga_ and _bulla_--has been
carried off from his home. His terrified exclamations, with which the
poem opens, as Canidia and her three assistants surround him, glaring
on him, with looks significant of their deadly purpose, through lurid
flames fed with the usual ghastly ingredients of a witch's fire,
carry us at once into the horrors of the scene. While one of the hags
sprinkles her hell-drops through the adjoining house, another is casting
up earth from a pit, in which the boy is presently imbedded to the chin,
and killed by a frightful process of slow torture, in order that a
love philtre of irresistible power may be concocted from his liver
and spleen. The time, the place, the actors are brought before us with
singular dramatic power. Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the
spells she deemed all-powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress
of skill superior to her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the
curses of the dying boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a
touch of beautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close.
The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars
have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and
ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which the
commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the original
of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of witchcraft abounded
at the time, combining very frequently, like their modern successors,
the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame Quickly. What more
natural than for a young poet to work up an effective picture out of
the abundant suggestions which the current stories of such creatures and
their doings presented to his hand? The popular belief in their power,
the picturesque conditions under which their spells were wrought, the
wild passions in which lay the secret of their hold upon the credulity
of their victims, offered to the Roman poet, just as they did to our own
Elizabethan dramatists, a combination of materials most favourable for
poetic treatment. But that Horace had, as many of his critics contend,
a feeling of personal vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge,
is an assumption wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any
time or under any circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal
nature with a woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have
been to use her and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not
only saw through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her
miserable impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems
to be impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and
not come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a
garden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay out on
the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-ground
of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of thieves
and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered with skulls
and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana are again
introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they pour the
blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn limb-meal,
"So to evoke the shade and soul
Of dead men, and from these to wring
Responses to their questioning."
They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool--the
latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, which cowers
before it,
"Like one that stands
Beseeching in the hangman's hands.
On Hecate one, Tisiphone
The other calls; and you might see
Serpents and hell-hounds thread the dark,
Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark,
The moon, all bloody red of hue,
Behind the massive tombs withdrew."
The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their
ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in terror
to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the beldams make
the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up his horrors
with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some terrible
climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted
by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but
exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In
an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their
incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more
comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can
carry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth,
and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:--
"While you
With laughter long and loud might view
Their herbs, and charmed adders wound
In mystic coils, bestrew the ground."
And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an old
mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and Horace
returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as though he had
been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his former calumnies
about her.
"My youth has fled, my rosy hue
Turned to a wan and livid blue;
Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair;
No respite have I from despair.
The days and nights, they wax and wane,
Yet bring me no release from pain;
Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp,
The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."
Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign magical
influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the mischief
he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what penance he
will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will appease her
wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as the chaste and
good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star, his lyre is at
her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her life is pure,
but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the poet takes care to
insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in conclusion, thus:--
"Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont
Among the tombs of paupers hunt
For ashes newly laid in ground,
Love-charms and philtres to compound,
Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands."
Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The
man who,
"Branding her name with ill renown,
Made her the talk of all the town,"
is not so lightly to be forgiven.
"You'd have a speedy doom? But no,
It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow."
The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types
of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--his
efforts will be vain:--
"Then comes my hour of triumph, then
I'll goad you till you writhe again;
Then shall you curse the evil hour
You made a mockery of my power."
She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim.
What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of my
victim melts before my magic fire [Footnote: Thus Hecate in Middleton's
"Witch" assures to the Duchess of Glo'ster "a sudden and subtle death"
to her victim:--]--I, who can bring down the moon from her sphere, evoke
the dead from their ashes, and turn the affections by my philtres,--
"Shall I my potent art bemoan
As impotent 'gainst thee alone?"
Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's
"Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used
Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her
craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons.
His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this
sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a class;
and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the 8th of
his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-party
broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain
point,--"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous
than that of African vipers, had swept across them."
"His picture made in wax, and gently molten
By a blue fire, kindled with dead men's eyes,
Will waste him by degrees."--
An old delusion. We find it in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken by her
lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative (Idylls ii. 28)--
"As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic,
Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon."
Again Ovid (Heroides vi. 91) makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:
"The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax she
devises, And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts."