e heights of Mount Vultur, that
Lucanian hill where once, when overcome by fatigue, the youthful poet
lay sleeping, and doves covered his childish and wearied limbs with
leaves--Horace must have often viewed, with their wide expanse
glittering in the sun, the waters of the Adriatic--often must he have
hailed the grateful freshness of the sea-breeze and the invigorating
perfumes of

---- 'the early sea-smell blown
Through vineyards from some inland bay.'

Yet about this sea, which should have kindled his imagination and
inspired his genius, this thankless bard poetises in a vein such as a
London citizen, some half-century back, might have indulged in after a
long, tedious, 'squally' voyage in an overladen Margate hoy.

No such spirit possessed him as that which dictated poor Campbell's
noble apostrophe to the glorious 'world of waters:'

---- 'Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in;
The lightning's glance, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it, like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.'

Horace, indeed, has sung the praises of Tarentum--that beautiful
maritime city of the Calabrian Gulf, whose attractions were such as to
make _the delights of Tarentum_ a common proverbial expression. But
what were these delights as celebrated by our poet?--the perfection of
its honey, the excellence of its olives, the abundance of its grapes,
its lengthened spring and temperate winter. For these, its merits, did
Horace prefer, as he tells us, Tarentum to every other spot on the
wide earth--his beloved Tibur only and ever excepted. In truth, Horace
valued and visited the sea-side only in winter, and then simply
because its climate was milder than that to be met with inland, and
therefore more agreeable to the dilapidated constitution of a
sensitive valetudinarian. His commentators suppose he produced nothing
during his marine hybernations: if the inclement season froze 'the
genial current of his soul,' the aspect of the sea did not thaw it.

His motive for his sea-side trips is amusingly set forth in one of the
most lively and characteristic of his Epistles--the fifteenth of the
first book. In this he inquires of a friend what sort of winter
weather is to be found at Velia a