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OLD POETS foster’d under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had roll’d you round and round the sun, You see your Art still shrined in human shelves, You should be jubilant that you flourish’d here Before the Love of Letters, overdone, Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves. |