, it is not mere discontent or inconsistency in
Horace which he is attacking. Horace loved both city and country.

And yet, whatever the appeal of the city and its artificialities,
Horace's real nature called for the country and its simple ways. It is
the Horace of Venusia and the Sabines who is the more genuine of the
two. The more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-hold
sometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting critic
will hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which celebrate
the fields and hamlets of Italy and the prowess of her citizen-soldiers
of time gone by, or against the mellow epistles and lyrics in which the
poet philosophizes upon the spectacle of human life.

_i_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN
LANDSCAPE

The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of the
beauty and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literary
imagination which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. It
is not an Italy in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's
_Bucolics_, but the Italy of Horace's own time, the Italy of his own
birth and experience, and the Italy of today. Horace is not a
descriptive poet. The reader will look in vain for nature-poems in the
modern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our vision
the beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy.
The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught his
eye, are those that we still see. There are the oak and the opaque ilex,
the pine and the poplar, the dark, funereal cypress, the bright flower
of the too-short-lived rose, and the sweet-scented bed of violets. There
are the olive groves of Venafrum. Most lovely of sights and most
beautiful of figures, there is the purple-clustered vine of vari-colored
autumn wedded to the elm. There is the bachelor plane-tree. There are
the long-horned, grey-flanked, dark-muzzled, liquid-eyed cattle, grazing
under the peaceful skies of the Campagna or enjoying in the meadow their
holiday freedom from the plow; the same cattle that Carducci sings--

"I_n the grave sweetness of whose tranquil eyes_
O_f emerald, broad and still reflected, dwells_
A_ll the divine green silence of the plain_."

We are made to see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing
heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads
his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Ca