Away then with your ploughs, we need them not,
Your scythes, your sickles, and your pruning-hooks!
Away with all your trumpery at once!
Seed-time and harvest-home and vintage wakes—
Your holidays are nothing worth to us.
Our rivers roll with luxury, our vats
O'erflow with nectar, which providing Jove
Showers down by cataracts; the very gutters
From our house-tops spout wine, vast forests wave,
Whose very leaves drop fatness, smoking viands
Like mountains rise.—All nature's one great feast.—Cumberland.
Philemon. (Book vii. § 32, p. 453.)
How strong is my desire 'fore earth and heaven,
To tell how daintily I cook'd his dinner
'Gainst his return! By all Athena's owls!
'Tis no unpleasant thing to hit the mark
On all occasions. What a fish had I—
And ah! how nicely fried! Not all bedevill'd
With cheese, or brown'd atop, but though well done,
Looking alive, in its rare beauty dress'd.
With skill so exquisite the fire I temper'd,
It seem'd a joke to say that it was cook'd.
And then, just fancy now you see a hen
Gobbling a morsel much too big to swallow;
With bill uplifted round and round she runs
Half-choking; while the rest are at her heels
Clucking for shares. Just so 'twas with my soldiers;
The first who touch'd the dish upstarted he
Whirling round in a circle like the hen,
Eating and running; but his jolly comrades,
Each a fish worshipper, soon join'd the dance,
Laughing and shouting, snatching some a bit,
Some missing, till like smoke the whole had vanish'd.
Yet were they merely mud-fed river dabs:
But had some splendid scaros graced my pan,
Or Attic glaucisk, or, O saviour Zeus!
Kapros from Argos, or the conger eel,
Which old Poseidon exports to Olympus,
