BOOK I

The Fox strikes an infamous cloud, smelling nothing of incense,
into the faces of those catching it. A reference to the fox’s foul scent glands, used as a final defense against its captors.
I prefer SAMSON: whom no damnable vow
had moved to the woodland caves,
But a vengeful spirit. He was able to catch three hundred
foxes to damage the enemy's grain. Balde refers to the biblical story in Judges 15, where Samson tied torches to the tails of three hundred foxes to burn the Philistines' crops.
O, if only a hook would pull out worse foxes,
which are stabled in the Halls of Kings;
So that they gnaw the cultivated crops, and waste the vineyards,
and the whole Honor of VIRTUE:
That hunter would be held greater, though he were the last peasant,
than Samson himself. The poet shifts from literal hunting to a political allegory, suggesting that corrupt advisors and flatterers at court are more destructive "foxes" than the animals in the woods.

XIII.

We go, companions, to run through the Amyclaean woods. original: "Amyclæos." Amyclae was a city in Laconia, Greece, famous in antiquity for its breed of hunting dogs.
To this place my nature, to this place my familiar
joys call me.
Does the very face of the place at first, and the crown of the groves,
not entice one into the fields,
while the birds sing?
Then there is the open air, and a pure draft
of fresh breath from the open sky;
and the living water of the spring.
Here the earth lies level, there it swells higher;
and it strikes the stars that look down
from the great mountains.
Elsewhere it is raised up into modest hills,
or plays along the sloping valleys:
these varied things bring delight.
Here hazelnuts are mixed with beeches, there alders with oaks
exhibit green scenes.
Farewell, industrious city.
I feel such lively stirrings in my breast, I know not how:
when the sight of the countryside comes over me,
and the leaf-flowing grove. original: "Frondifluum." A poetic term describing a forest so dense with foliage it seems to flow with leaves.

Lo,