mortuary musings. You loved the lesson of the
roses, and now and again would speak somewhat like a death's head over
thy temperate cups of Sabine _ordinaire_. Your melancholy moral was
but meant to heighten the joy of thy pleasant life, when wearied Italy,
after all her wars and civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful haven. The
harbour might be treacherous; the prince might turn to the tyrant; far
away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless,
ceaseless monotone of beating horses' hoofs and marching feet of men.
They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there
was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North,
_officina gentium_, mustering and marshalling her peoples. But their
coming was not to be to-day, nor to-morrow; nor to-day was the budding
princely sway to blossom into the blood-red flower of Nero. In the hall
between the two tempests of Republic and Empire your odes sound 'like
linnets in the pauses of the wind.'

What joy there is in these songs! what delight of life, what an
exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what
tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is fair
in the glittering stream, the music of the waterfall, the hum of bees,
the silvery grey of the olive woods on the hillside! How human are all
your verses, Horace! what a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars,
swaying in the wind! what gladness you gain from the white crest of
Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are
being piled higher on the hearth. You sing of women and wine--not all
whole-hearted in your praise of them, perhaps, for passion frightens
you, and 't is pleasure more than love that you commend to the young.
Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a heart at
ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended. You
seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than
Sophocles was to 'flee from these hard masters' the passions. In the
'fallow leisure of life' you glance round contented, and find all very
good save the need to leave all behind. Even that you take with an
Italian good-humour, as the folk of your sunny country bear poverty and
hunger.

_Durum, sed levius fit patientia_!

To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to
live for. None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem
to me to ha