irists and writers of letters who never transfer the
colors of life to their canvas; but the lyrics, too, are kaleidoscopic
with scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleeting
but vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the
sportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy
thrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside,
the anxious mother at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyes
from the curved shore, the husbandman passing industrious days on his
own hillside, tilling his own acres with his own oxen, and training the
vine to the unwedded tree, the young men of the hill-towns carrying
bundles of fagots along rocky slopes, the rural holiday and its
festivities, the sun-browned wife making ready the evening meal against
the coming of the tired peasant. We are shown all the quaint and quiet
life of the countryside.

The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort which
for all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of the
country mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that ate
until he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the rustic
who sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called man to
aid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most formal
and dignified of the _Odes_ are not without the mellow charm of Italian
landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six
_Odes_ of the third book, often called the _Inaugural Odes_, we get such
glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius on
election day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships under
the open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and the
low-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood of
Voltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and the
stern patriotism of Regulus. Without these the _Inaugurals_ would be but
barren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against the
domestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat and
picturesqueness:

'T_was not the sons of parents such as these_
T_hat tinged with Punic blood the rolling seas_,
L_aid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought_
G_reat Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught_;

B_ut the manly brood of rustic soldier folk_,
T_aught, when the mother or the father spoke_
T_he word austere, obediently to wield_