With gold and amber chains, elaborate frame:

Each female eye the glittering links employ;

They turn, review, and cheapen every toy.

He took the occasion, as they stood intent,

Gave her the sign, and to his vessel went.

She straight pursued, and seized my willing arm;

I follow’d, smiling, innocent of harm.

Three golden goblets in the porch she found

(The guests not enter’d, but the table crown’d);

Hid in her fraudful bosom these she bore:

Now set the sun, and darken’d all the shore.

Arriving then, where tilting on the tides

Prepared to launch the freighted vessel rides,

Aboard they heave us, mount their decks, and sweep

With level oar along the glassy deep.

Six calmy days and six smooth nights we sail,

And constant Jove supplied the gentle gale.

The seventh, the fraudful wretch (no cause descried),

Touch’d by Diana’s vengeful arrow, died.

Down dropp’d the caitiff-corse, a worthless load,

Down to the deep; there roll’d, the future food

Of fierce sea-wolves, and monsters of the flood.

An helpless infant I remain’d behind;

Thence borne to Ithaca by wave and wind;

Sold to Laertes by divine command,

And now adopted to a foreign land.”


To him the king: “Reciting thus thy cares,

My secret soul in all thy sorrow shares;

But one choice blessing (such is Jove’s high will)

Has sweeten’d all thy bitter draught of ill:

Torn from thy country to no hapless end,

The gods have, in a master, given a friend.

Whatever frugal nature needs is thine

(For she needs little), daily bread and wine.

While I, so many wanderings past, and woes,

Live but on what thy poverty bestows.”


So passed in pleasing dialogue away

The night; then down to short repose they lay;

Till radiant rose the messenger of day.

While in the port of Ithaca, the band

Of young Telemachus approach’d the land;

Their sails they loosed, they lash’d the mast aside,

And cast their anchors, and the cables tied: