ODE 6

Thou 'lt rue thy fathers' sins, not thine,
Till built the temples be, replaced
The statues, foul and smoke-defaced, —
Roman, — and reared each tottering shrine.

Thou rul'st but under heaven's hand.
Thence all beginnings come, all ends.
Neglected, mark what woes it sends
On this our miserable land.

Twice Pacorus and Monaeses foiled
Our luckless onset: huge their glee.
When to their necklaces they see
Hanging the wealth of Rome despoiled.

Dacian and Æthiop nigh laid low
Our state, with civil feuds o'errun;
One with his fleet dismayed her, one
Smote her with arrows from his bow.

A guilty age polluted first
Our beds, hearths, families: from that source
Derived, the foul stream, gathering force,
O'er the broad land, a torrent, burst.

Pleased, now, the maiden learns to move
To soft Greek airs: already knows —
Fresh from the nursery — how to pose
Her graceful limbs; and dreams of love:

Next, while her lord drinks deep, invites
Her gallants in: nor singles one,
Into whose guilty arms to run,
Stealthy and swift, when dim the lights:

No! in her lord's sight up springs she:
Alike at some small tradesman's beck,
As his who walks a Spanish deck
And barters wealth for infamy.

— Were those lads of such parents bred
Who dyed the seas with Punic blood?
Pyrrhus, Antiochus withstood,
And Hannibal, the nation's dread?

Rude soldiers' sons, a rugged kind,
They brake the soil with Sabine spade:
Or shouldered stakes their axe had made
To a right rigorous mother's mind,

What time the shadows of the rocks
Change, as the sun's departing car
Sends on the hours that sweetest are,
And men unyoke the wearied ox.

Time mars not — what? A spoiler he.
Our sires were not so brave a breed
As their sires: we, a worse, succeed;
To raise up sons more base than we.