90
CATULLUS.
the wars safe and sound, Conon discovered it a constellation in the firmament. He had returned victorious; the lock had been reft from its mistress's head with that resistless steel to which ere then far sturdier powers had succumbed—
"But what can stand against the might of steel?
'Twas that which made the proudest mountain reel,
Of all by Thia's radiant son surveyed,
What time the Mede a new Ægean made,
And hosts barbaric steered their galleys tall
Through rifted Athos' adamantine wall.
When things like these the power of steel confess,
What help or refuge for a woman's tress?"—(42-47.) M.
'Twas that which made the proudest mountain reel,
Of all by Thia's radiant son surveyed,
What time the Mede a new Ægean made,
And hosts barbaric steered their galleys tall
Through rifted Athos' adamantine wall.
When things like these the power of steel confess,
What help or refuge for a woman's tress?"—(42-47.) M.
Need we suggest the parallel from Pope?—
"What time could spare from steel receives its date,
And monuments, like men, submit to fate.
Steel could the labours of the gods destroy,
And strike to dust the imperial towers of Troy;
Steel could the works of mortal pride confound,
And hew triumphal arches to the ground.
What wonder then, fair nymph, thine hairs should feel
The conquering force of unresisted steel?"
And monuments, like men, submit to fate.
Steel could the labours of the gods destroy,
And strike to dust the imperial towers of Troy;
Steel could the works of mortal pride confound,
And hew triumphal arches to the ground.
What wonder then, fair nymph, thine hairs should feel
The conquering force of unresisted steel?"
The tress proceeds to describe her passage through the air, and her eventual accession to the breast of Venus, thence to be transferred to an assigned position among the stars. A high destination, as the poem makes Berenice's hair admit, yet one (and here adulation takes its finest flight) which it would cheerfully forego to be once more lying on its mistress's head:—
