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Books

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Order

Title Page
Under the Hill

Prose
The Art of the Hoarding
Letters to his Critics
   Pall Mall Budget
   Daily Chronicle
   St. Paul’s
Table Talk
Lines upon Pictures
   St Rose of Lima
   Salome

Poetry
The Three Musicians
The Ballad of a Barber
Ave Atque Vale
The Celestial Lover
The Ivory Piece
Prospectus for Volpone

Appendix : Juvenilia
The Valiant
A Ride in an Omnibus
The Confession Album
The Courts of Love
Dante in Exile
Written in Uncertainty
The Morte Darthur

Enoch Soames

Under the Hill
Ave Atque Vale
Ave Atque Vale

Ave Atque Vale

By ways remote and distant waters sped,
Brother, to thy sad grave-side am I come,
That I may give the last gifts to the dead,
And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb:
Since she who now bestows and now denies
Hath taken thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes.
But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years,
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell,
Take them, all drenchèd with a brother’s tears,
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell!

 

¶ 1896. First published in The Savoy, No.7, November 1896. Beardsley’s verses were written when he was already gravely ill, and follow closely a prose translation made by Smithers and the polymath Sir Richard Burton for their edition of the Carmina of Catullus, one of Smithers’s first, and most elegant, publications.