lf I'd brave,
So fate the darling girl would spare.

_She._

I dote on Calais; and I
Am all his passion, all his care,
For whom a double death I'd die,
So fate the darling boy would spare.

_He._

What if our ancient love return,
And bind us with a closer tie,
If I the fair-haired Chloe spurn,
And, as of old, for Lydia sigh?

_She._

Though lovelier than yon star is he,
Thou fickle as an April sky,
More churlish too than Adria's sea,
With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die.

The austere Scaliger used to say that he would rather have written this
ode than be King of Spain and the Indies: Milton's Eve expresses her
devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased from its closing lines.

Observe, too, how we find in all the Odes as we read them, not only a
gallery of historical pictures, nor only an unconscious revelation of
the poet's self, of, that is, the least subjective among poets, ever, as
says Sir Stephen De Vere, looking outward, never looking in; but they
incidentally paint for us in vivid and familiarizing tints the intimate
daily life of that far-off ancient queen of cities. We walk with them
the streets of Rome. We watch the connoisseurs gazing into the curiosity
shops and fingering the bronzes or the silver statuettes; the naughty
boys jeering the solemn Stoic as he walks along, staid, superior,
absent; the good boys coming home from school with well-thumbed lesson
books; the lovers in the cookshops or restaurants shooting apple pips
from between finger and thumb, rejoicing in the good omen if they strike
the ceiling; the stores of Sulpicius the wine merchant and of Sosius the
bookseller; the great white Latian ox, exactly such as you see to-day,
driven towards the market, with a bunch of hay upon his horns to warn
pedestrians that he is dangerous; the coarse drawings in chalk or
colours on the wall advertising some famous gladiator; at dusk the
whispering lovers in the Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads
and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares, just as you may
watch them to-day on spring or winter evenings amongst the lower arches
of the Colosseum;--it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that old-world life.
Horace knew, and feared not to say, that in his poems, in his Odes
especially, he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind, while setting
up a lasting monument to himself. One thing he could not know, that when
near two thousand year