TO A TREE.
Horace
O tree, he planted thee on an unlucky day whoever did it first, and with
an impious hand raised thee for the destruction of posterity, and the
scandal of the village. I could believe that he had broken his own
father's neck, and stained his most secret apartments with the midnight
blood of his guest. He was wont to handle Colchian poisons, and whatever
wickedness is anywhere conceived, who planted in my field thee, a sorry
log; thee, ready to fall on the head of thy inoffensive master. What we
ought to be aware of, no man is sufficiently cautious at all hours. The
Carthaginian sailor thoroughly dreads the Bosphorus; nor, beyond that,
does he fear a hidden fate from any other quarter. The soldier dreads
the arrows and the fleet retreat of the Parthian; the Parthian, chains
and an Italian prison; but the unexpected assault of death has carried
off, and will carry off, the world in general. How near was I seeing the
dominions of black Proserpine, and Aeacus sitting in judgment; the
separate abodes also of the pious, and Sappho complaining in her Aeohan
lyre of her own country damsels; and thee, O Alcaeus, sounding in fuller
strains on thy golden harp the distresses of exile, and the distresses
of war. The ghosts admire them both, while they utter strains worthy of
a sacred silence; but the crowded multitude, pressing with their
shoulders, imbibes, with a more greedy ear, battles and banished
tyrants. What wonder? Since the many headed monster, astonished at those
lays, hangs down his sable ears; and the snakes, entwined in the hair of
the furies, are soothed. Moreover, Prometheus and the sire of Pelops are
deluded into an insensibility of their torments, by the melodious sound:
nor is Orion any longer solicitous to harass the lions, or the fearful
lynxes.
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