Lays of Ancient Rome - 7

Horatius at the Bridge
by Thomas B. Macaulay

XIII

But by the yellow Tiber
        Was tumult and affright:
From all the spacious champaign
        To Rome men took their flight.
A mile around the city,
        The throng stopped up the ways;
A fearful sight it was to see
        Through two long nights and days.

XIV

For aged folks on crutches,
        And women great with child,
And mothers sobbing over babes
        That clung to them and smiled,
And sick men borne in litters
        High on the necks of slaves,
And troops of sun-burned husbandmen
        With reaping-hooks and staves,

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Continued next week. Tomorrow's installment from the great Arab book Thousand and One Nights.

More About This Book

This poem celebrates one of the great heroic legends of history. Horatius saves Rome from the Etruscan invaders in 642 BC. Scottish poet Macaulay published this in 1842.

Illustration: Horatio at the Bridge from the first edition.

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