our homage hail:
We, skilled in choral harmonies to raise
The hymn to Phoebus and Diana's praise.

Of course in all this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the
inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley,
scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman
temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in
that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality.
There might be a shadowy world--the poets said so--Odysseus visited its
depths and brought back its report--but it was a gloomy place at best.
Horace alludes to it always in the tone of the Hebrew Psalmists, or of
Hezekiah sick to death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tantalus and
Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and
alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament
for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale
who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are
pitiless--we can only bear bereavements patiently (II, iii). You must
leave, my Dellius, your pleasant groves and your cottage upon Tiber's
banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops equally on all:

Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left;
And cypresses abhorred,
Alone of all the trees
That now your fancy please,
Shall shade his dust who was awhile their lord.

(II, xiv, 21.)

2. MORAL. But if the gods are beyond our ken, and if the world to come
is misty, we still have this world with us; a world not always to be
daffed aside with love and wine and comradeship, since behind its frolic
wantonness lie the ennobling claims of duty and of conscience. As with
Fielding, as with Thackeray, the light current tone of sportiveness or
irony heightens the rare solemnity of didactic moral earnestness. Of all
the Latin poets, says Sir Richard Fanshaw, Horace is the fullest fraught
with excellent morality. In the six stately Odes which open the third
book, together with a later Ode (xxiv) which closes the series and ought
never to have been severed from it, Horatian poetry rises to its
greatest height of ethical impressiveness. Ushered in with the solemn
words of a hierophant bidding the uninitiated avaunt at the commencement
of a religious ceremony (III, i, 1-2), delivered with official
assumption in the fine frenzy of a muse-inspired priest, their unity
of purpose and of style makes them virtually a