Awake to life, my sleeping shell,

To Phoebus let thy numbers swell;

And though no glorious prize be thine,

No Pythian wreath around thee twine,

Yet every hour is glory's hour

To him who gathers wisdom's flower.

Then wake thee from thy voiceless slumbers,

And to the soft and Phrygian numbers,

Which, tremblingly, my lips repeat,

Send echoes, from thy chord as sweet.

'Tis thus the swan, with fading notes,

Down the Cayster's current floats,

While amorous breezes linger round,

And sigh responsive sound for sound.

Muse of the Lyre! illume my dream,

Thy Phoebus is my fancy's theme;

And hallowed is the harp I bear,

And hallowed is the wreath I wear,

Hallowed by him, the god of lays,

Who modulates the choral maze.

I sing the love which Daphne twined

Around the godhead's yielding mind;

I sing the blushing Daphne's flight

From this ethereal son of Light;

And how the tender, timid maid

Flew trembling to the kindly shade.

Resigned a form, alas, too fair,

Arid grew a verdant laurel there;

Whose leaves, with sympathetic thrill,

In terror seemed to tremble still!

The god pursued, with winged desire;

And when his hopes were all on fire,

And when to clasp the nymph he thought,

A lifeless tree was all he caught;

And 'stead of sighs that pleasure heaves,

Heard but the west-wind in the leaves!

But, pause, my soul, no more, no more—

Enthusiast, whither do I soar?

This sweetly-maddening dream of soul

Hath hurried me beyond the goal.

Why should I sing the mighty darts

Which fly to wound celestial hearts,

When ah, the song, with sweeter tone,

Can tell the darts that wound my own?

Still be Anacreon, still inspire

The descant of the Teian lyre:

Still let the nectared numbers float

Distilling love in every note!

And when some youth, whose glowing soul

Has felt the Paphian star's control,

When he the liquid lays shall hear,

His heart will flutter to his ear,

And drinking there of song divine,

Banquet on intellectual wine![2]

[1] This hymn to Apollo is supposed not to have been written by Anacreon; and it is undoubtedly rather a sublimer flight than the Teian wing is accustomed to soar. But in a poet of whose works so small a proportion has reached us, diversity of style is by no means a safe criterion. If we knew Horace but as a satirist, should we easily believe there could dwell such animation in his lyre? Suidas says that our poet wrote hymns, and this perhaps is one of them. We can perceive in what an altered and imperfect state his works are at present, when we find a scholiast upon Horace citing an ode from the third book of Anacreon.

[2] Here ends the last of the odes in the Vatican MS., whose authority helps to confirm the genuine antiquity of them all, though a few have stolen among the number, which we may hesitate in attributing to Anacreon.