fleet away
Our years, nor piety one hour
Can win from wrinkles, and decay,
And death's indomitable power;

Not though three hundred steers you heap
Each day, to glut the tearless eyes
Of Him, who guards in moated keep
Tityos, and Geryon's triple size:

All, all, alas! that watery bound
Who eat the fruits that Nature yields,
Must traverse, be we monarchs crowned,
Or humblest tillers of the fields.

(II, xiv.)

The antipathy is not confined to heathenism; we distrust the Christian
who professes to ignore it; many of us felt drawn by a brotherhood of
humanity to the late scholarly Pope, when we learned that, as death
looked him in the face, he clung to Pagan Horace as a truthful and
sympathetic oracle. "And we all go to-day to this singer of the ancient
world for guidance in the deceptions of life, and for steadfastness in
the face of death."

[Illustration: _Alinari photo._]

[_Capitol Museum, Rome._

VIRGIL.]

4. PERSONAL. Something, but not very much, we learn of Horace's intimates
from this class of Odes. Closest to him in affection and oftenest
addressed is Maecenas. The opening Ode pays homage to him in words
closely imitated by Allan Ramsay in addressing the chief of his clan:

Dalhousie of an auld descent,
My chief, my stoup, my ornament;

and at the end of the volume the poet repeats his dedication (III,
xxix). Twice he invites his patron to a feast; to drink wine bottled on
the day some years before when entering the theatre after an illness
he was received with cheers by the assembled multitude (I, xx); again
on March 1st, kept as the festal anniversary of his own escape from a
falling tree (III, viii). To a querulous letter from his friend written
when sick and dreading death, he sends the tender consolation and
remonstrance of which we spoke before (p. 29). In a very different tone
he sings the praises of Licymnia (II, xii), supposed to be Terentia,
Maecenas' newly-wedded wife, sweet voiced, witty, loving, of whom her
husband was at the time passionately enamoured. He recounts finally, with
that delicate respectful gratitude which never lapses into servility,
his lifelong obligation, lauding gratefully the still removed place which
his friend's bounty has bestowed:

A clear fresh stream, a little field, o'ergrown
With shady trees, a crop that ne'er deceives.

(III, xvi, 29.)

Not less tenderly affectionate is the exquisite Ode to Virgil