Thine be the twilight vow from
faltering
tongue;
The joyous laugh that self-betraying guides
To where the maiden hides;
The ring from finger half resisting wrung.
The joyous laugh that self-betraying guides
To where the maiden hides;
The ring from finger half resisting wrung.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
"I have called upon.
the worthy citizen who made them, over and over again, and
never could get them, for of course I could not expect him to
send them, and he is always either at the academy or the gym-
nasium; however, to-day I caught him just as he was in a hot
debate with a gentleman who was cleaning his windows, as to
whether the solidity of a prism is equal to the product of its base
by its altitude. I confess I was pleased to catch him at home;
but unluckily the question was referred to me, and not compre-
hending it I was deucedly glad to get off, which I did as fast as
I could, both parties calling after me, 'There is a lord for you
-look at my lord! ' and hooting me in a manner which, how-
ever constitutional, I cannot help thinking deucedly disagreeable. "
At this moment (what in former times was called) a footman,
named Dowbiggin, made his appearance, who entered the room;
as the duke hoped, to remove the breakfast things, but it was in
fact to ask Lady Maria to sketch in a tree in a landscape which
he was in the course of painting.
"Dowbiggin," said his Grace in despair, "I wish you would
take away these breakfast things. "
"Indeed! " said Dowbiggin, looking at the duke with the most
ineffable contempt-"you do! -that's capital-what right have
you to ask me to do any such thing? "
"Why, Mr. Dowbiggin," said the duchess, who was a bit of
a tartar in her way, "his Grace pays you, and feeds you, and
clothes you, to—”
"Well, duchess," said Dowbiggin, "and what then? Let his
Grace show me his superiority. I am ready to do anything for
him: but please to recollect I asked him yesterday, when I did
remove the coffee, to tell me what the Altaic chain is called,
when, after having united all the rivers which supply the Jeni-
sei, it stretches as far as the Baikal lake and what did he
answer? He made a French pun, and said, Je ne sais pas,
Dobiggin. Now, if it can be shown by any statute that I, who
am perfectly competent to answer any question I propose, am
first to be put off with a quibble by way of reply; and secondly,
to be required to work for a man who does not know as much
-
## p. 7617 (#427) ###########################################
THEODORE HOOK
7617
as I do myself, merely because he is a duke, why, I'll do it:
but if not, I will resist in a constitutional manner such illiberal
oppression and such ridiculous control, even though I am trans-
ported to Scotland for it. Now, Lady Maria, go on with the
tree. "
"Willy," said the duke to his son, "when you have put away
your small-clothes, go and ask Mr. Martingale if he will be kind.
enough to let the horses be put to our carriage, since the duchess
and I wish to go to mass. "
"You need not send to Martingale," said Dowbiggin: "he is
gone to the Society of Arts to hear a lecture on astronomy. "
"Then, Willy, go and endeavor to harness the horses your-
self," said the duke to his son, who instantly obeyed.
"You had better mind about those horses, sir," said Dowbig-
gin, still watching the progress of his tree: "the two German
philosophers and Father O'Flynn have been with them to-day,
and there appears little doubt that the great system will spread,
and that even these animals, which we have been taught to de-
spise, will express their sentiments before long. "
"The sentiments of a coach-horse! " sighed the duchess.
"Thanks, Lady Maria," said Dowbiggin: "now I'll go to work
merrily; and duke, whenever you can fudge up an answer to my
question about the Altaic chain, send one of the girls, and I'll
take away the things. "
Dowbiggin disappeared; and the duke, who was anxious to
get the parlor cleared (for the house, except two rooms, was all
appropriated to the assistants), resolved to inquire of his priest
what the proper answer would be to Dowbiggin's question which
he had tried to evade by the offensive quibble, when Lord Will-
iam Cobbett Russell reappeared, as white as a sheet.
"My dear father," cried his Lordship, "it's all over now. The
philosophers have carried the thing too far: the chestnut mare
swears she'll be d-d if she goes out to-day. "
"What," said the duke, "has their liberality gone to this?
Do horses talk? My dear William, you and I know that asses
have written before this; but for horses to speak! "
"Perhaps, Willy," said the duchess, "it is merely yea and
nay; or probably only the female horses who talk at all. "
"Yes, mother, yes," said her son, "both of them spoke; and
not only that, but Nap, the dog you were once so fond of, called
after me to say that we had no right to keep him tied up in
XIII-477
## p. 7618 (#428) ###########################################
7618
THEODORE HOOK
that dismal yard, and that he would appeal to Parliament if we
did not let him out. "
"My dear duchess," said the duke, who was even more alarmed
at the spread of intelligence than her Grace, "there is but one
thing for us to do: let us pack up all we can, and if we can get
a few well-disposed post-horses, before they become too much
enlightened, to take us towards the coast, let us be off. "
What happened further, this historical fragment does not ex-
plain; but it is believed that the family escaped with their clothes
and a few valuables, leaving their property in the possession of
their assistants, who by extending with a liberal anxiety (natural
in men who have become learned and great by similar means
themselves) the benefits of enlightenment, in turn gave way to
the superior claims of inferior animals, and were themselves com-
pelled eventually to relinquish happiness, power, and tranquillity
in favor of monkeys, horses, jackasses, dogs, and all manner of
beasts.
## p. 7619 (#429) ###########################################
7619
HORACE
(QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS)
(65 B. C. -8 B. C. )
BY HARRIET WATERS PRESTON
AKE care of Horace as you would of me" ("Horatii Flacci ut
mei esto memor"). The words of the dying Mæcenas to the
Emperor Augustus throw a singularly attractive light over
the relations of the three famous men whose names they associate.
They show the yearning human affection of the great patron of
Roman letters for the man of genius whose best work he had made
possible, and who had returned his bounty so nobly. They also dis-
close that redeeming quality in the not too delicate or scrupulous
master of the world, which invited on the part of those whom he
personally esteemed a homely and trustful familiarity. There is no
reason to doubt that the last wish of Mæcenas would have been
abundantly heeded; but as the event proved, there was little further
occasion for the imperial patronage. Mæcenas passed away after a
lingering illness in the summer of 746 (8 B. C. ); Horace died suddenly
on the 27th of November in the same year: and the affectionate vow
not to linger long in life after his good genius had left it, which the
poet had recorded in some of his most exquisite verses nearly seven-
teen years before, thus received a curious and touching fulfillment.
The lines were these:
"Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears—
Why, O Mæcenas, why?
Before thee lies a train of happy years;
Yea, nor the gods, nor I
Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust:
That art my stay, my glory, and my trust!
Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence,
Thee, of my soul a part,
Why should I linger on with deadened sense
And ever-aching heart,
A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?
No, no-one day shall see thy death and mine!
## p. 7620 (#430) ###########################################
7620
HORACE
Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath:
Yes, we shall go, shall go
Hand linked in hand whene'er thou leadest both
The last sad road below! » *
The outlines of the poet's rather uneventful history may be given
briefly. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born in the year of the city
of Rome 689 (65 B. C. ) at Venusia, now Venosa, a small hill town
lying about a hundred miles from Naples, eastward toward the Adri-
atic. His father was a freedman who had acquired a modest com-
petence; and the historic name of Horatius was merely that of the
great Latin tribe or gens to which the master of the former slave had
belonged. That the elder Horace was also a man of much force and
dignity of character, we gather from many passages in the writings
of the son: most of all from a peculiarly manly and loyal tribute in
the sixth satire of the first book. He would give his only child no
less than the best instruction possible in those days. He went with
him to Rome, and watched carefully over the boy's manners and
morals during his preliminary studies there; and afterward sent him,
where only the sons of noblemen and wealthy knights went usually
in those days, to finish his education at Athens. There, while nom-
inally attending lectures in philosophy, Horace must have indulged
his natural bent, and simply steeped himself in the lyric poetry of
Greece: especially in the iambic satires of Archilochus of Paros, and
the odes of Sappho, Alcæus, and Anacreon.
But this congenial and care-free life at Athens was doomed to
receive a rude interruption. Horace had left Rome at about twenty,
during the supremacy of Julius Cæsar. A year later, in 44 B. C. , the
dictator fell, and his assassins took refuge in Athens. The crowd of
impressionable young Roman students immediately rallied round
Brutus, espoused his cause with the utmost enthusiasm, enlisted in
the army he was raising, and worshiped him as a republican hero.
In return for their devotion, Brutus, when gathering his forces for
the last struggle with Antony, distributed commands among these
ardent neophytes, for which they were at best not fitted by previous
active service. It was thus that Horace was made military tribune
at twenty-two, commanded at the battle of Philippi what would cor-
respond to a regiment in a modern army,- and retreated from that
fatal field, leaving, as he afterward quaintly confessed, his buckler
behind him, when the day and the cause were finally lost. (Odes,
Book II. , vii. )
He returned to Italy to find his good father dead, the little Venu-
sian property confiscated as that of a rebel, and a prospect before
* Odes, Book II. , xvii. , Sir Theodore Martin's translation.
## p. 7621 (#431) ###########################################
HORACE
7621
him which would have been dismal enough to any but one of his
sunny and debonair disposition and happy facility in making friends.
He presently secured a small place, as we should say, in the civil
service; that of quæstor's clerk. Suetonius says that he purchased it,
after making his submission to the authorities (venia impetrata); but
I think we may take it for granted that there was no mean or un-
timely abjuration of his republican creed on the part of one whom in
after years even imperial blandishments failed to shake in his quiet
independence of thought and action.
It is plain, at all events, that the freedman's son never forfeited
the place he had won in the best of the young Roman society.
Within three years after his return from Greece, we find him upon
friendly terms both with Virgil, who was five years his senior, and
with the epic poet and tragedian Lucius Varius Rufus. By them he
was introduced, at the age of twenty-six, to Mæcenas, the first citi-
zen of Rome at that moment in social and political influence, and
the acknowledged arbiter of literary destinies. The poet himself, in
the same satire in which he commemorates the fine character and
unselfish devotion of his father (Satires, I. , vi. ), has left us a diverting
account of this first momentous interview with Mæcenas - which it
pleases him to represent as a conspicuous fiasco. He himself, he says,
behaved like an awkward child, while the great man — whom, by the
way, he was then addressing — was very distant and awful. But after
holding aloof, and considering for a number of months the works
and ways of the new candidate for his favor, Mæcenas succumbed
without reserve to the young man's personal fascination, opened wide
both his house and his heart, and ended by becoming almost dotingly
fond of him. We find Horace in the spring of the next year, 717
(37 B. C. ), attached, along with Virgil, to the highly distinguished suite
which accompanied Mæcenas on an embassy from Augustus to treat
with Antony at Brindisi. About 720-the exact date is nowhere
recorded, but it must have been before the close of the civil war in
723- Horace was made independent of the world, and even of any
sordid obligation to literature, by the gift of that beautiful little estate
among the Sabine Hills which is so closely associated with his name
and fame; and where the pilgrim may yet go and pay his vows to
that pleasant memory, as at a sweet undesecrated shrine.
It was
the fittest gift ever made by a liberal man of fortune to a needy
man of parts, and both offered and received in the finest spirit.
We flatter ourselves in these days that we have reduced charity as
well as most other things to a science; but much of the anxious, arbi-
trary, and over-organized benevolence of modern times, with its disin-
genuous and dreary subtleties about profusion and pauperization, and
its intrinsic selfishness, stands rebuked before the simple. and noble
## p. 7622 (#432) ###########################################
7622
HORACE
give-and-take of these two pagans, which inflicted no hurt upon the
dignity of either, while it laid the generations that were to come
under endless obligations.
During his brief period of storm and stress, Horace had already
turned his nimble wits to account, and become known to some extent
as a satirical poet. "When," he says (Epistles, II. , ii. ),—" when I
came back with clipped wings from Philippi, poor, insignificant, re-
lieved even of the paternal home and farm, reckless poverty impelled
me to verse-making. But now that I am in easy circumstances, you
might take it as a symptom of raging fever in me if I could not
sleep for the pressure of unwritten poetry! " It is easy to see how
this laughing self-depreciation, this resolute refusal to take himself
and his brilliant endowments over-seriously, of which across the centu-
ries we can still feel the charm, must have helped to endear Horace
to his friends in every grade of life. It was a part of the exquisite
savoir-faire which always marked his bearing in the great world; of
that innate good sense and invincible good breeding which were as
much a gift of heaven to the freedman's son as his youthful good
looks, and no more prejudiced by his rustic boyhood, and his early
familiarity with such brave sons of the Italian soil as his father and
their racy neighbor at Venusia, the yeoman Ofellus. (Satires, II. , ii. )
His unaffected love of nature and a country life was in fact a
main safeguard of the poet's mental health, and the best of all aids
to his talent. It breathes in many of the Horatian lines and phrases
which linger longest in the memory. Horace never expatiates on his
love of natural beauty; rather, it escapes from his verses at inter-
vals, like a hoarded but volatile perfume. Doubtless he was the
more reserved, not to say shamefaced, about this deep sentiment of
his own, because there was plainly a fashion in the Rome of his day
for affecting a rapturous enjoyment of country scenes and pursuits,
and affectation of every kind excited his cordial abhorrence. The
most detailed and delightful description of rural pleasures which
Horace anywhere gives us is to be found in the second Epode: but
he has a laugh in the concluding verses at the reader's expense and
his own; and we are bound to take the joke in as good part as
the audience probably did when the poem was first read to a distin-
guished private company. "So spake the money-lender Alphius, all
on fire to become a country gentleman; and having called in all the
money which fell due upon the Ides, he immediately let it out again.
upon the Kalends! »
From the time when he became a landed proprietor, Horace him-
self passed a considerable part of every year in his country home.
The land was more or less impoverished by neglect when he took
possession, and the buildings dilapidated. He had the healthful and
## p. 7623 (#433) ###########################################
HORACE
7623
Here,
inexhaustible amusement of repairing, planting, beautifying.
under his own vine and fig-tree, he could rest his nerves from city
bores, and recuperate his digestion after city banquets. Here he
could throw himself into the interests and tickle himself with the
humors of his tenants and rustic neighbors, and easily practice the
homely hospitality in which his own soul delighted. He by no means
renounced the hospitalities of Mæcenas and the gay society of the
capital, but he reveled in possessing a safe and convenient retreat
from it all. The Sabine property was but thirty miles from Rome.
Horace never affected the aristocratic litter, but went and came
freely upon his own ambling mule, over one of the most beautiful
roads in all the world: southward across the campagna, threading
the hoary olives of the first ascent, and passing "many-fountained"
Tivoli; then up beside the Anio into the higher hills, until he turned
aside upon the left into the sunny silence of a yet more secluded
valley, that of the tributary Digentia, now Licenza.
men.
The early satires of Horace are plainly an outcome of the studies
of Archilochus which he had made at Athens; but he adopts the
measure and professes himself rather the disciple of Lucilius, the
rude forefather of the Latin satire. Of those first off-hand squibs
and sketches,-which he intimates in a passage already quoted that
he wrote for immediate pay,—it is uncertain how many he cared
afterward to include in his collected writings. The seventh satire of
the first book bears marks of having been written very early,-per-
haps while he was still playing the soldier in Greece. The third,
fourth, and tenth of the first book are in the main apologetic. They
defend the satire as the readiest and most efficient weapon of the
moralist, and as a wholesome check upon the follies and excesses of
They also proclaim his own resolve never to abuse the cen-
sor's privilege; and to indulge in no personal criticisms inconsist-
ent with the code of social honor of his age, and with a generally
kindly and tolerant view of the infirmities of humankind. The first
satire of the second book is one of the most dramatic and amusing
of the whole series. It is in the form of a dialogue with one Tre-
batius,—a rich and famous old lawyer, on the best of terms with the
powers that then were, who good-humoredly advises the poet to give
up altogether the ticklish trade of a satirist, and when he finds him-
self growing dangerously hot over the follies of the day, to reduce
his temperature by a bath in the Tiber! Great interest attaches to
the name of Horace's supposed interlocutor in this witty piece, for he
is the selfsame Trebatius for whom Cicero twenty-five years before
had procured a place on the staff of Cæsar in Gaul; who had loathed
the hardships of that country, and adroitly avoided following the
conqueror to Britain; and in whose beautiful villa at Reggio, Cicero
## p. 7624 (#434) ###########################################
7624
HORACE
had found refuge ten years later, when he was himself a fugitive
from Rome after the death of Cæsar. Trebatius was never the man
to have lost his head through any romantic adhesion to a fallen
cause; and it is positively startling to see how he preserves his
identity across a complete gap of so many years in our knowledge
of him.
All the eighteen satires of the two books, as well as most of the
Epodes, were apparently given to the world under the patronage of
Mæcenas, during the ten years or so which intervened between the
poet's introduction to that dignitary and the close of the weary civil
war by the victory of Actium. In them we find faithfully reflected
the daily life of the Roman streets, as well as the fashion of the
moment in what claimed to be the most exclusive circles of the cap-
ital. The earlier the composition, as a rule, the coarser the language
and the more caustic the tone. We fancy that we can see the
writer's expression becoming ever more suave and genial as his tem-
per mellowed with his days of modest prosperity, and his easy and
indulgent though never unmanly or ignoble philosophy of life took
shape and became a consciously accepted creed. He was never,
either in theory or practice, a very rigid moralist. He lashed men's
follies lightly and forgave their lapses freely. Himself, as judged by
the standards of the time, a clean and quiet liver, he was content to
hold up to ridicule, rather than to stern reprobation, the vices of
other men
"Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day. "
We have plenty of proof that there were moments when the gay
and facile Horace felt, no less keenly than the pensive and clair-
voyant Virgil habitually felt, the essential "emptiness," for a Roman
of that day, which followed the extinction of his civic personality.
More and more, as the years of his outwardly successful and brilliant
middle life slipped away, the patriotism of Horace became a resolutely
smothered regret; while his loves, which can never have been very
absorbing or impassioned, resolved themselves into the half amused,
half wistful recollection of transient affairs with women who had had
many lovers.
It is only when he sings of friendship, of honor and
gratitude, of faith and charity between man and man, that this con-
vinced Epicurean strikes a deeper note. The brevity of life and the
vacuity of death were ever present in the background of his thought;
but all the more was he minded to enjoy, to the full, the sunshine of
the passing day. Moderation in all things, content with the present,
courage in view of an absolutely uncertain future. - these things, in
## p. 7625 (#435) ###########################################
HORACE
7625
so far as Horace aspires to be didactic, constitute the sum and sub-
stance of his teaching.
It was inevitable that such a man, already fast bound by the
warmest of private ties to the first minister of Cæsar Octavianus,
should have accepted frankly the changed order of things when the
latter returned to Rome in 725, after the battle of Actium and the
deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, to assume the sceptre of a pacified
world. Liberty was past, and it behooved men to be thankful for
peace, and poets to praise it; believing if they could that it implied
the beginning of another age of gold. A good many of the more
respectable and better disposed Romans of that period did probably
believe this, after a fashion. The tragic note of covert warning dis-
cernible in the ode addressed by Horace (Odes, II. , x. ) to his ill-fated
friend Licinius Murena, the brother-in-law of Mæcenas, who was con-
demned and executed a few years later for conspiring against the
new government, shows how utterly wild and wanton that enterprise
must have appeared at the time. Sixty or seventy years were to
pass before the mystery of iniquity was ripe and all the vices inher-
ent in the imperial system became fully apparent; before the next
great Roman satirist, Persius, gave vent in mordant and melancholy
verse to the smothered rage of the best of the patrician remnant,
against the degrading "regiment" of their parvenu sovereigns.
Virtually, therefore, though not officially, Horace became the poet
laureate of the court which formed itself about the ruler who pres-
ently assumed the name of Augustus. All the great odes of the four
books belong to the next fifteen years; and of these, all the statelier
and more impersonal were written under imperial inspiration, and
some few, like the 'Carmen Sæculare,' and the fourth ode of the
fourth book,- which celebrates the German victories of Drusus,- in
response to direct imperial request. Yet Horace always managed to
preserve his personal freedom, and to avoid even the suspicion of
servility. He sang the triumphs of Augustus in golden numbers, but
he declined with respectful thanks the post of his private secretary.
Nor would he write an ode, to order, on the achievements of Agrippa;
but politely, if a little ironically, excused himself on the ground that
his light muse was unequal to so serious a theme (Odes, I. , vi. ).
The first book of the Epistles appeared about 731; probably be-
tween the second and third books of the Odes. The second, com-
prising the unfinished essay on the 'Art of Poetry,' was Horace's last
work, produced after he was fifty years old. His health was no longer
what it had been, and even the air of the dear valley overlooked
by pleasant Lucretilis" was becoming a trifle too brisk and bracing
for his nerves. Tibur (Tivoli) he thought suited him better, and he
prepared for himself a little installation there; but confesses in one
<<
## p. 7626 (#436) ###########################################
7626
HORACE
of his letters (Epistles, I. , viii. ) that he was restless as the wind:-
"When I am in Rome I am in love with Tibur, and when at Tibur,
with Rome. " Sometimes he longed for yet softer skies; and the
nook of earth which smiled upon him above all others "Ille terra-
rum mihi præter omnes Angulus ridet». was sunny Tarentum, with
its long spring and its gentle winter, which produced better honey
than Hymettus, better olives than leafy Venafrum, and better grapes
than Falernum itself (Odes, II. , vi. ). The end came when the poet
lacked only a few days of having completed his fifty-seventh year:
and by order of the Emperor he was laid beside Mæcenas, some-
where in the great gardens which the latter had planted upon the
redeemed Esquiline hill.
It is in the Odes that the genius of Horace finds its most perfect
expression, and through them he lives in the memory of mankind.
In them he shows himself so consummate an artist in words that
he can impart distinction even to the commonplaces of thought and
sentiment through the mere perfection of their form. His diction is
distilled to such crystalline clearness, he says what he has to say
so unapproachably and incredibly well, that his thought would be
wronged and obscured by the attempt to express it in any other
words than his own. Hence, of all poets ancient or modern, Shake-
speare alone excepted, he is perhaps most frequently quoted. The
phrase "curious felicity," applied in the age succeeding the Augus-
tan by Petronius to the style of Horace, is very apt; yet it seems
to emphasize just a little too strongly the notion of research. For
Horace's manner is after all so simple and seemingly spontaneous,
and his matter of such universal interest, that he has the effect of
addressing each reader confidentially, and making a special appeal to
him. And this air of exquisite familiarity and naturalness is the
more remarkable, because it pleased the accomplished singer of the
Odes to discard for the most part the simple iambics and hexameters
of his previous compositions, and to employ the most elaborate of
Greek lyric measures; molding in a truly miraculous manner the stiff
Latin syllables into harmony with the graces of an alien rhythm, and
now and again simply paraphrasing from the Greek. The éclat of
this feat has helped no doubt to render the adventure of translating
Horace more enticing; but he has never been adequately translated,
and it is safe to prophesy that he never will be. His qualities are
combined in too rare and subtle proportions.
The first printed edition, with date, of the works of Quintus Ho-
ratius Flaccus appeared in Milan in 1474; and almost every year in
the four hundred odd that have elapsed since then has added one
more to the devoted critics and commentators of his text.
The end-
less procession of his poetical translators comprises, in English only,
## p. 7627 (#437) ###########################################
HORACE
7627
and within our own time, such names as those of Bulwer-Lytton,
Conington, Gladstone, Sir Theodore Martin, and Sir Stephen de Vere;
while the lively paraphrases of the brothers Field of Chicago, per-
haps for the very reason that they deal with Horace so nearly in the
spirit in which he dealt with his Grecian models, appear to come
nearer, sometimes, than all the laborious efforts of more exact schol-
ars to catching the tone of the inimitable original.
The subjoined English versions are nearly all selected from these
more modern renderings, for the reason that they are upon the whole
both the most scholarly and the most successful; and an effort has
been made to present a fair idea of their comparative merits.
Harmet Traces Preston
TO LEUCONOË
O
SEEK not thou-'tis not to know- what end to me, what end
to thee
The gods have given, nor Babylonish numbers test, Leuconoë.
How better far it is to bear whatever lot for us be cast!
Or whether Jove more winters still, or whether gives he this the last,
Which now on pumice-crags opposing ever breaks th' Etruscan sea;
Be wise; strain out thy wines, and trim thine all too long expectancy
To life's brief span. Now while we speak, invidious time hath slipt
away.
O thou, as little as may be the morrow trusting, snatch to-day!
Translation of Caskie Harrison.
TO THALIARCHUS
A
SPECTRAL form Soracte stands, snow-crowned,
His shrouded pines beneath their burden bending;
Not now, his rifts descending,
Leap the wild streams, in icy fetters bound.
Heap high the logs! Pour forth with lavish hand,
O Thaliarchus, draughts of long-stored wine,
Blood of the Sabine vine!
To-day be ours: the rest the gods command.
While storms lie quelled at their rebuke, no more
Shall the old ash her shattered foliage shed,
## p. 7628 (#438) ###########################################
7628
HORACE
The cypress bow her head,
The bursting billow whiten on the shore.
Scan not the future: count as gain each day
That Fortune gives thee; and despise not, boy,
Or love, or dance, or joy
Of martial games, ere yet thy locks be gray.
Thine be the twilight vow from faltering tongue;
The joyous laugh that self-betraying guides
To where the maiden hides;
The ring from finger half resisting wrung.
O
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
TO THE SHIP OF STATE
From W. E. Gladstone's 'Odes of Horace. Copyright 1894, by Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons
SHIP! new billows sweep thee out
Seaward. What wilt thou? Hold the port, be stout!
Seest not thy mast
How rent by stiff southwestern blast?
Thy side, of rowers how forlorn!
Thine hull, with groaning yards, with rigging torn,
Can ill sustain
The fierce and ever fiercer main;
Thy gods, no more than sails entire,
From whom, yet once, thy need might aid require.
O Pontic pine,
The first of woodland stock is thine,
Yet race and name are but as dust.
Not painted sterns give storm-tost seamen trust
Unless thou dare
To be the sport of storms, beware!
Of old at best a weary weight,
A yearning care and constant strain of late,
O shun the seas
That gird those glittering Cyclades.
## p. 7629 (#439) ###########################################
HORACE
7629
C
TO CHLOE
Paraphrase out of Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
HLOE, you shun me like a hind
That, seeking vainly for her mother,
Hears danger in each breath of wind,
And wildly darts this way and t'other;
Whether the breezes sway the wood
Or lizards scuttle through the brambles,
She starts; and off as though pursued
The foolish frightened creature scrambles.
But, Chloe, you're no infant thing
That should esteem a man an ogre:
Let go your mother's apron-string
And pin your faith upon a toga!
TO VIRGIL
HY should we stem the tears that needs must flow?
WHY Why blush that they should freely flow and long
To think of that dear head in death laid low?
Do thou inspire my melancholy song.
Melpomene, in whom the Muses' sire
Joined with a liquid voice the mastery of the lyre!
And hath the sleep that knows no waking morn
Closed o'er Quinctilius,— our Quinctilius dear?
Where shall be found the man of woman born
That in desert might be esteemed his peer-
So simply meek, and yet so sternly just,
Of faith so pure, and all so absolute of trust?
He sank into his rest, bewept of many,
And but the good and noble wept for him;
But dearer cause thou, Virgil, hadst than any,
With friendship's tears thy friendless eyes to dim.
Alas, alas! not to such woeful end
Didst thou unto the gods thy prayers unceasing send!
What though thou modulate the tuneful shell
With defter skill than Orpheus of old Thrace,
## p. 7630 (#440) ###########################################
7630
HORACE
When deftliest he played, and with its spell
Moved all the listening forest from its place,
Yet never, never can thy art avail
To bring life's glowing tide back to the phantom pale
Whom, with his black, inexorable wand,
Hermes, austere and pitiless as fate,
Hath forced to join the dark and spectral band,
In their sad journey to the Stygian gate.
'Tis hard-great Heavens, how hard! But to endure
Alleviates the pang we cannot crush or cure.
Translated by Sir Theodore Martin.
TO QUINTUS DELLIUS
Paraphrase out of Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
E TRANQUIL, Dellius, I pray;
B
For though you pine your life away
With dull complaining breath,
Or speed with song and wine each day,
Still, still, your doom is death.
Where the white poplar and the pine
In glorious arching shade combine,
And the brook singing goes,
Bid them bring store of nard and wine
And garlands of the rose.
Let's live while chance and youth obtain:
Soon shall you quit this fair domain
Kissed by the Tiber's gold,
And all your earthly pride and gain
Some heedless heir shall hold.
One ghostly boat shall sometime bear
From scenes of mirthfulness or care
Each fated human soul,-
Shall waft and leave its burden where
The waves of Lethe roll.
So come, I prithee, Dellius mine;
Let's sing our songs and drink our wine
In that sequestered nook
Where the white poplar and the pine
Stand listening to the brook.
## p. 7631 (#441) ###########################################
HORACE
7631
AD AMPHORAM
O
HONEST jar! whose birth takes date,
Like mine, from Manlius's consulate,
Whether complaints or jokes they be,
Wrangling, or love's insanity,
Or quiet sleep that dwell with thee;
Beneath whatever brand 'tis thine
To bottle up choice Massic wine,
For happy day like this thou'rt fit:
Come down-Corvinus orders it—
And thy more mellow juice emit.
Though steeped in all Socratic learning,
From thee he will not, shocked, be turning.
The elder Cato oft, 'tis said,
His virtue's fire with liquor fed.
With Bacchic mirth thou layest bare
Wise men's deep counsel and their care.
Thou bring'st back hope to minds forlorn,
And vigor; and the poor man's horn
Upliftest, so that after thee
No dread of angered majesty
Or of a soldier's arms has he.
With thee shall Bacchus linger still,
And Venus (so she gladly will),
And Graces, slow to disunite,
And living lanterns, shining bright,
Till Phoebus put the stars to flight.
Translation of W. T. Thornton.
TO PHIDYLE
F, PHIDYLE, your hands you lift
I'
To heaven, as each new moon is born,
Soothing your Lares with the gift
Of slaughtered swine, and spice, and corn,
Ne'er shall Sirocco's bane assail
Your vines, nor mildew blast your wheat;
Ne'er shall your tender younglings fail
In autumn, when the fruits are sweet.
The destined victim, 'mid the snows
Of Algidus in oak woods fed,
Or where the Alban herbage grows,
Shall dye the pontiff's axes red.
## p. 7632 (#442) ###########################################
7632
HORACE
No need of butchered sheep for you
To make your homely prayers prevail!
Give but your little gods their due:
The rosemary twined with myrtle frail,
The sprinkled salt, the votive meal,
As soon their favor will regain —
Let but the hand be pure and leal-
As all the pomp of heifers slain.
Translation of John Conington.
AN INVITATION TO MECENAS
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
D
EAR noble friend! A virgin cask
Of wine solicits your attention;
And roses fair to deck your hair,
And things too numerous to mention.
So tear yourself awhile away
From urban turmoil, pride, and splendor,
And deign to share what humble fare
And sumptuous fellowship I tender.
The sweet content retirement brings
Smooths out the ruffled front of kings.
The evil planets have combined
To make the weather hot, and hotter;
By parboiled streams the shepherd dreams
Vainly of ice-cream soda-water.
And meanwhile you, defying heat,
With patriotic ardor ponder
On what old Rome essays at home,
And what her heathen do out yonder.
Mæcenas, no such vain alarm
Disturbs the quiet of this farm!
God in his providence obscures
The goal beyond this vale of sorrow,
And smiles at men in pity when
They strive to penetrate the morrow.
With faith that all is for the best,
Let's bear what burdens are presented;
Then we shall say, let come what may,
"We die, as we have lived, contented!
## p. 7633 (#443) ###########################################
HORACE
7633
Ours is to-day; God's is the rest -
He doth ordain who knoweth best. "
Dame Fortune plays me many a prank:
When she is kind, oh, how I go it!
But if again she's harsh, why, then
I am a very proper poet.
When favoring gales bring in my ships,
I hie to Rome and live in clover;
Elsewise I steer my skiff out here
And anchor till the storm blows over.
Compulsory virtue is the charm
Of life upon the Sabine Farm!
XIII-478
HORRIDA TEMPESTAS
THROU
HROUGH narrowed skies the tempest rages loud:
A vault low-hung and roofed with cloud
Bursts forth in rain and snow. The woods, the sea,
Echo the storm from Thracian Rhodope.
-
now:
Snatch we, my friends, the fitting moment -
While strong our knees, make smooth the wrinkled brow;
Bring forth the wine of ancient date
Pressed in Torquatus's consulate;
Of toil and danger speak no more:
Some god may yet our shattered state restore!
Perfume your hair with Achæmenian balm,
And bid Cyllene's lyre your troubled spirits calm.
-
'Twas thus the noble Centaur sung :-
"Unconquered youth, from Thetis sprung,
Thyself a mortal! The Dardanian land,
And cool Scamander rippling through the sand,
And gliding Simois, call thee to their side;
Nor shall thy mother o'er her azure tide
Lead thee in triumph to thy Phthian home:
Such the weird Fate's inexorable doom.
Grieve not, my son: in song and wassail find
A soothing converse and a solace kind. "
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
## p. 7634 (#444) ###########################################
7634
HORACE
SATIRE
CHANCED that I, the other day,
I
Was sauntering up the Sacred Way,
And musing, as my habit is,
Some trivial random fantasies,
That for the time absorbed me quite,-
When there comes running up a wight,
Whom only by his name I knew:
"Ha, my dear fellow, how d'ye do? »
Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why,
As times go, pretty well,” said I:
"And you, I trust, can say the same. "
But after me as still he came,
"Sir, is there anything," I cried,
"You want of me? " "Oh," he replied,
"I'm just the man you ought to know:
A scholar, author! "-"Is it so?
For this I'll like you all the more! "
Then, writhing to evade the bore,
I quicken now my pace, now stop,
And in my servant's ear let drop
Some words, and all the while I feel
Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel.
"Oh for a touch," I moaned in pain,
«< Bolanus, of thy slap-dash vein,
To put this incubus to rout! "
As he went chattering on about
Whatever he descries or meets,
The crowds, the beauty of the streets,
The city's growth, its splendor, size,
"You're dying to be off," he cries-
For all the while I'd been struck dumb:
"I've noticed it some time. But come,
Let's clearly understand each other:
It's no use making all this pother.
My mind's made up to stick by you;
So where you go, there I go too. "
"Don't put yourself," I answered, "pray,
So very far out of your way.
I'm on the road to see a friend,
Whom you don't know, that's near his end,
Away beyond the Tiber far,
Close by where Cæsar's gardens are. "
## p. 7635 (#445) ###########################################
HORACE
7635
"I've nothing in the world to do,
And what's a paltry mile or two?
I like it, so I'll follow you! "
Now we were close on Vesta's fane;
'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane,
Was bound to answer to his bail,
Or lose his cause if he should fail.
"Do, if you love me, step aside
One moment with me here," he cried
"Upon my life, indeed I can't:
Of law I'm wholly ignorant,
And you know where I'm hurrying to. "
"I'm fairly puzzled what to do:
Give you up, or my cause. ” — “Oh, me,
Me, by all means! "-"I won't," quoth he,
And stalks on, holding by me tight.
As with your conqueror to fight
Is hard, I follow. "How," anon
He rambles off-"How get you on,
You and Mæcenas? To so few
He keeps himself. So clever, too!
No man more dexterous to seize
And use his opportunities.
Just introduce me, and you'll see
We'll pull together famously;
And hang me then, if with my backing
You don't send all your rivals packing! "
"Things in that quarter, sir, proceed
In very different style indeed.
No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not if there I spy
Men richer, better read than I.
Each has his place! "- "Amazing tact!
Scarce credible! ». "But 'tis the fact. "
―
"You quicken my desire to get
An introduction to his set. "
We ran
At the next turn against the man
Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
"Ha, knave," he cried with loud uproar,
"Where are you off to? Will you here
Stand witness? " I present my ear.
To court he hustles him along;
High words are bandied, high and strong;
## p. 7636 (#446) ###########################################
7636
HORACE
HⓇ
ORACE
――
A mob collects, the fray to see:
So did Apollo rescue me.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
CONTENTMENT
What did you think, my friend, of far-famed Lesbos and
Chios?
-
How about Samos the dainty, and Croesus's capital, Sardis ?
Colophon, too, and Smyrna? Above their fame, or beneath it?
Tiber's stream and the Campus excel them far, do you tell me?
Have you been praying for one of Attalus's cities, I wonder?
Lebedos is it you praise, of the sea and your journeyings wearied?
Bullatius- Yes! You know what Lebedos is: more dead than
Fidenæ.
Ay, or than Gabii; yet I would gladly abide there, forgetting
Those I have loved, and expecting that they in their turn will forg
me.
There I would dwell, and gaze from the shore on the furious waters.
Horace If a man travel in mud and in rain from Capua Rome-
ward,
Drenched though he be, he will choose not to tarry for life in the
tavern.
Even when chilled to the bones, we praise not the bath and the
furnace,
Truly believing that they would make life full and successful;
Nor, if impetuous Auster has tossed you about on the billow,
Would you for that get rid of your vessel beyond the Ægean.
If you are perfectly sound, then Rhodes and fair Mitylene
Help you no more than a cloak in the dog-days, trunks in midwinter,
Or in December a plunge in the Tiber, a furnace in August.
Now that you may, and the face of Fortune is smiling upon you,
Here at Rome praise far-off Rhodes, and Chios, and Samos.
This one hour that a god has bestowed upon you in his bounty,
Take with a grateful hand, nor plan next year to be happy:
So that wherever your life may be spent, you will say you enjoyed it.
For if anxieties only by reason and foresight are banished,—
Not by a spot that commands some outlook wide on the waters. —
Never our nature, but only the sky do we change as we travel.
Toilsome idleness wears us out. On wagon and shipboard
Comfort it is that we seek; yet that which you seek, it is with you,
Even in Ulubræ, if you lack not contentment of spirit.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
## p. 7637 (#447) ###########################################
HORACE
7637
HORACE'S FARM
L
EST you may question me whether my farm, most excellent Quinc-
tius,
Feeds its master with grain, or makes him rich with its olives,
Or with its orchards and pastures, or vines that cover the elm-trees,
I, in colloquial fashion, will tell you its shape and position.
Only my shadowy valley indents the continuous mountains,
Lying so that the sun at his coming looks on the right side,
Then, with retreating chariot, warming the left as he leaves it.
Surely the temperature you would praise; and what if the bushes
Bear in profusion scarlet berries, the oak and the ilex
Plentiful food for the herd provide, and shade for the master?
You would say, with its verdure, Tarentum was hither transported.
There is a fountain, deserving to give its name to a streamlet.
Not more pure nor cooler in Thrace runs winding the Hebrus.
Helpful it is to an aching head or a stomach exhausted.
Such is my ingle: sweet, and, if you believe me, delightful;
Keeping me sound and safe for you even in days of September.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
TO HIS BOOK
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm, by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
vain self-conscious little book,
Companion of my happy days,
Now eagerly you seem to look
For wider fields to spread your lays;
My desk and locks cannot contain you,
Nor blush of modesty restrain you.
YOU
Well then, begone, fool that thou art!
But do not come to me and cry,
When critics strike you to the heart,
"Oh wretched little book am I! "
You know I tried to educate you
To shun the fate that must await you.
In youth you may encounter friends,
(Pray this prediction be not wrong! )
But wait until old age descends,
And thumbs have smeared your gentlest song:
## p. 7638 (#448) ###########################################
7638
HORACE
Then will the moths connive to eat you,
And rural libraries secrete you.
However, should a friend some word
Of my obscure career request,
Tell him how deeply I was stirred
To spread my wings beyond the nest;
Take from my years, which are before you,
To boom my merits, I implore you.
Tell him that I am short and fat,
Quick in my temper, soon appeased,
With locks of gray. but what of that?
Loving the sun, with nature pleased.
I'm more than four-and-forty, hark you-
But ready for a night off, mark you!
-
THE ART OF POETRY
SU
UPPOSE, by some wild freak of fancy led,
A painter were to join a human head
To neck of horse, cull here and there a limb,
And daub on feathers various as his whim,
So that a woman, lovely to a wish,
Went tailing off into a loathsome fish:
Could you, although the artist's self were there,
From laughter long and loud, my friends, forbear?
Well, trust me, Pisos, of that freak of art
The book would be the very counterpart,
Which with a medley of wild fancies teems,
Whirling in chaos like a sick man's dreams,
A maze of forms incongruous and base,
Where naught is of a piece, naught in its place.
To dare whate'er they please has always been
The painter's, poet's, privilege, I ween.
It is a boon that any one may plead -
Myself I claim it, and in turn concede;
But 'twill not do to urge the plea too far.
To join together things that clash and jar.
The savage with the gentle, were absurd,
Or couple lamb with tiger, snake with bird.
the worthy citizen who made them, over and over again, and
never could get them, for of course I could not expect him to
send them, and he is always either at the academy or the gym-
nasium; however, to-day I caught him just as he was in a hot
debate with a gentleman who was cleaning his windows, as to
whether the solidity of a prism is equal to the product of its base
by its altitude. I confess I was pleased to catch him at home;
but unluckily the question was referred to me, and not compre-
hending it I was deucedly glad to get off, which I did as fast as
I could, both parties calling after me, 'There is a lord for you
-look at my lord! ' and hooting me in a manner which, how-
ever constitutional, I cannot help thinking deucedly disagreeable. "
At this moment (what in former times was called) a footman,
named Dowbiggin, made his appearance, who entered the room;
as the duke hoped, to remove the breakfast things, but it was in
fact to ask Lady Maria to sketch in a tree in a landscape which
he was in the course of painting.
"Dowbiggin," said his Grace in despair, "I wish you would
take away these breakfast things. "
"Indeed! " said Dowbiggin, looking at the duke with the most
ineffable contempt-"you do! -that's capital-what right have
you to ask me to do any such thing? "
"Why, Mr. Dowbiggin," said the duchess, who was a bit of
a tartar in her way, "his Grace pays you, and feeds you, and
clothes you, to—”
"Well, duchess," said Dowbiggin, "and what then? Let his
Grace show me his superiority. I am ready to do anything for
him: but please to recollect I asked him yesterday, when I did
remove the coffee, to tell me what the Altaic chain is called,
when, after having united all the rivers which supply the Jeni-
sei, it stretches as far as the Baikal lake and what did he
answer? He made a French pun, and said, Je ne sais pas,
Dobiggin. Now, if it can be shown by any statute that I, who
am perfectly competent to answer any question I propose, am
first to be put off with a quibble by way of reply; and secondly,
to be required to work for a man who does not know as much
-
## p. 7617 (#427) ###########################################
THEODORE HOOK
7617
as I do myself, merely because he is a duke, why, I'll do it:
but if not, I will resist in a constitutional manner such illiberal
oppression and such ridiculous control, even though I am trans-
ported to Scotland for it. Now, Lady Maria, go on with the
tree. "
"Willy," said the duke to his son, "when you have put away
your small-clothes, go and ask Mr. Martingale if he will be kind.
enough to let the horses be put to our carriage, since the duchess
and I wish to go to mass. "
"You need not send to Martingale," said Dowbiggin: "he is
gone to the Society of Arts to hear a lecture on astronomy. "
"Then, Willy, go and endeavor to harness the horses your-
self," said the duke to his son, who instantly obeyed.
"You had better mind about those horses, sir," said Dowbig-
gin, still watching the progress of his tree: "the two German
philosophers and Father O'Flynn have been with them to-day,
and there appears little doubt that the great system will spread,
and that even these animals, which we have been taught to de-
spise, will express their sentiments before long. "
"The sentiments of a coach-horse! " sighed the duchess.
"Thanks, Lady Maria," said Dowbiggin: "now I'll go to work
merrily; and duke, whenever you can fudge up an answer to my
question about the Altaic chain, send one of the girls, and I'll
take away the things. "
Dowbiggin disappeared; and the duke, who was anxious to
get the parlor cleared (for the house, except two rooms, was all
appropriated to the assistants), resolved to inquire of his priest
what the proper answer would be to Dowbiggin's question which
he had tried to evade by the offensive quibble, when Lord Will-
iam Cobbett Russell reappeared, as white as a sheet.
"My dear father," cried his Lordship, "it's all over now. The
philosophers have carried the thing too far: the chestnut mare
swears she'll be d-d if she goes out to-day. "
"What," said the duke, "has their liberality gone to this?
Do horses talk? My dear William, you and I know that asses
have written before this; but for horses to speak! "
"Perhaps, Willy," said the duchess, "it is merely yea and
nay; or probably only the female horses who talk at all. "
"Yes, mother, yes," said her son, "both of them spoke; and
not only that, but Nap, the dog you were once so fond of, called
after me to say that we had no right to keep him tied up in
XIII-477
## p. 7618 (#428) ###########################################
7618
THEODORE HOOK
that dismal yard, and that he would appeal to Parliament if we
did not let him out. "
"My dear duchess," said the duke, who was even more alarmed
at the spread of intelligence than her Grace, "there is but one
thing for us to do: let us pack up all we can, and if we can get
a few well-disposed post-horses, before they become too much
enlightened, to take us towards the coast, let us be off. "
What happened further, this historical fragment does not ex-
plain; but it is believed that the family escaped with their clothes
and a few valuables, leaving their property in the possession of
their assistants, who by extending with a liberal anxiety (natural
in men who have become learned and great by similar means
themselves) the benefits of enlightenment, in turn gave way to
the superior claims of inferior animals, and were themselves com-
pelled eventually to relinquish happiness, power, and tranquillity
in favor of monkeys, horses, jackasses, dogs, and all manner of
beasts.
## p. 7619 (#429) ###########################################
7619
HORACE
(QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS)
(65 B. C. -8 B. C. )
BY HARRIET WATERS PRESTON
AKE care of Horace as you would of me" ("Horatii Flacci ut
mei esto memor"). The words of the dying Mæcenas to the
Emperor Augustus throw a singularly attractive light over
the relations of the three famous men whose names they associate.
They show the yearning human affection of the great patron of
Roman letters for the man of genius whose best work he had made
possible, and who had returned his bounty so nobly. They also dis-
close that redeeming quality in the not too delicate or scrupulous
master of the world, which invited on the part of those whom he
personally esteemed a homely and trustful familiarity. There is no
reason to doubt that the last wish of Mæcenas would have been
abundantly heeded; but as the event proved, there was little further
occasion for the imperial patronage. Mæcenas passed away after a
lingering illness in the summer of 746 (8 B. C. ); Horace died suddenly
on the 27th of November in the same year: and the affectionate vow
not to linger long in life after his good genius had left it, which the
poet had recorded in some of his most exquisite verses nearly seven-
teen years before, thus received a curious and touching fulfillment.
The lines were these:
"Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears—
Why, O Mæcenas, why?
Before thee lies a train of happy years;
Yea, nor the gods, nor I
Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust:
That art my stay, my glory, and my trust!
Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence,
Thee, of my soul a part,
Why should I linger on with deadened sense
And ever-aching heart,
A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?
No, no-one day shall see thy death and mine!
## p. 7620 (#430) ###########################################
7620
HORACE
Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath:
Yes, we shall go, shall go
Hand linked in hand whene'er thou leadest both
The last sad road below! » *
The outlines of the poet's rather uneventful history may be given
briefly. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born in the year of the city
of Rome 689 (65 B. C. ) at Venusia, now Venosa, a small hill town
lying about a hundred miles from Naples, eastward toward the Adri-
atic. His father was a freedman who had acquired a modest com-
petence; and the historic name of Horatius was merely that of the
great Latin tribe or gens to which the master of the former slave had
belonged. That the elder Horace was also a man of much force and
dignity of character, we gather from many passages in the writings
of the son: most of all from a peculiarly manly and loyal tribute in
the sixth satire of the first book. He would give his only child no
less than the best instruction possible in those days. He went with
him to Rome, and watched carefully over the boy's manners and
morals during his preliminary studies there; and afterward sent him,
where only the sons of noblemen and wealthy knights went usually
in those days, to finish his education at Athens. There, while nom-
inally attending lectures in philosophy, Horace must have indulged
his natural bent, and simply steeped himself in the lyric poetry of
Greece: especially in the iambic satires of Archilochus of Paros, and
the odes of Sappho, Alcæus, and Anacreon.
But this congenial and care-free life at Athens was doomed to
receive a rude interruption. Horace had left Rome at about twenty,
during the supremacy of Julius Cæsar. A year later, in 44 B. C. , the
dictator fell, and his assassins took refuge in Athens. The crowd of
impressionable young Roman students immediately rallied round
Brutus, espoused his cause with the utmost enthusiasm, enlisted in
the army he was raising, and worshiped him as a republican hero.
In return for their devotion, Brutus, when gathering his forces for
the last struggle with Antony, distributed commands among these
ardent neophytes, for which they were at best not fitted by previous
active service. It was thus that Horace was made military tribune
at twenty-two, commanded at the battle of Philippi what would cor-
respond to a regiment in a modern army,- and retreated from that
fatal field, leaving, as he afterward quaintly confessed, his buckler
behind him, when the day and the cause were finally lost. (Odes,
Book II. , vii. )
He returned to Italy to find his good father dead, the little Venu-
sian property confiscated as that of a rebel, and a prospect before
* Odes, Book II. , xvii. , Sir Theodore Martin's translation.
## p. 7621 (#431) ###########################################
HORACE
7621
him which would have been dismal enough to any but one of his
sunny and debonair disposition and happy facility in making friends.
He presently secured a small place, as we should say, in the civil
service; that of quæstor's clerk. Suetonius says that he purchased it,
after making his submission to the authorities (venia impetrata); but
I think we may take it for granted that there was no mean or un-
timely abjuration of his republican creed on the part of one whom in
after years even imperial blandishments failed to shake in his quiet
independence of thought and action.
It is plain, at all events, that the freedman's son never forfeited
the place he had won in the best of the young Roman society.
Within three years after his return from Greece, we find him upon
friendly terms both with Virgil, who was five years his senior, and
with the epic poet and tragedian Lucius Varius Rufus. By them he
was introduced, at the age of twenty-six, to Mæcenas, the first citi-
zen of Rome at that moment in social and political influence, and
the acknowledged arbiter of literary destinies. The poet himself, in
the same satire in which he commemorates the fine character and
unselfish devotion of his father (Satires, I. , vi. ), has left us a diverting
account of this first momentous interview with Mæcenas - which it
pleases him to represent as a conspicuous fiasco. He himself, he says,
behaved like an awkward child, while the great man — whom, by the
way, he was then addressing — was very distant and awful. But after
holding aloof, and considering for a number of months the works
and ways of the new candidate for his favor, Mæcenas succumbed
without reserve to the young man's personal fascination, opened wide
both his house and his heart, and ended by becoming almost dotingly
fond of him. We find Horace in the spring of the next year, 717
(37 B. C. ), attached, along with Virgil, to the highly distinguished suite
which accompanied Mæcenas on an embassy from Augustus to treat
with Antony at Brindisi. About 720-the exact date is nowhere
recorded, but it must have been before the close of the civil war in
723- Horace was made independent of the world, and even of any
sordid obligation to literature, by the gift of that beautiful little estate
among the Sabine Hills which is so closely associated with his name
and fame; and where the pilgrim may yet go and pay his vows to
that pleasant memory, as at a sweet undesecrated shrine.
It was
the fittest gift ever made by a liberal man of fortune to a needy
man of parts, and both offered and received in the finest spirit.
We flatter ourselves in these days that we have reduced charity as
well as most other things to a science; but much of the anxious, arbi-
trary, and over-organized benevolence of modern times, with its disin-
genuous and dreary subtleties about profusion and pauperization, and
its intrinsic selfishness, stands rebuked before the simple. and noble
## p. 7622 (#432) ###########################################
7622
HORACE
give-and-take of these two pagans, which inflicted no hurt upon the
dignity of either, while it laid the generations that were to come
under endless obligations.
During his brief period of storm and stress, Horace had already
turned his nimble wits to account, and become known to some extent
as a satirical poet. "When," he says (Epistles, II. , ii. ),—" when I
came back with clipped wings from Philippi, poor, insignificant, re-
lieved even of the paternal home and farm, reckless poverty impelled
me to verse-making. But now that I am in easy circumstances, you
might take it as a symptom of raging fever in me if I could not
sleep for the pressure of unwritten poetry! " It is easy to see how
this laughing self-depreciation, this resolute refusal to take himself
and his brilliant endowments over-seriously, of which across the centu-
ries we can still feel the charm, must have helped to endear Horace
to his friends in every grade of life. It was a part of the exquisite
savoir-faire which always marked his bearing in the great world; of
that innate good sense and invincible good breeding which were as
much a gift of heaven to the freedman's son as his youthful good
looks, and no more prejudiced by his rustic boyhood, and his early
familiarity with such brave sons of the Italian soil as his father and
their racy neighbor at Venusia, the yeoman Ofellus. (Satires, II. , ii. )
His unaffected love of nature and a country life was in fact a
main safeguard of the poet's mental health, and the best of all aids
to his talent. It breathes in many of the Horatian lines and phrases
which linger longest in the memory. Horace never expatiates on his
love of natural beauty; rather, it escapes from his verses at inter-
vals, like a hoarded but volatile perfume. Doubtless he was the
more reserved, not to say shamefaced, about this deep sentiment of
his own, because there was plainly a fashion in the Rome of his day
for affecting a rapturous enjoyment of country scenes and pursuits,
and affectation of every kind excited his cordial abhorrence. The
most detailed and delightful description of rural pleasures which
Horace anywhere gives us is to be found in the second Epode: but
he has a laugh in the concluding verses at the reader's expense and
his own; and we are bound to take the joke in as good part as
the audience probably did when the poem was first read to a distin-
guished private company. "So spake the money-lender Alphius, all
on fire to become a country gentleman; and having called in all the
money which fell due upon the Ides, he immediately let it out again.
upon the Kalends! »
From the time when he became a landed proprietor, Horace him-
self passed a considerable part of every year in his country home.
The land was more or less impoverished by neglect when he took
possession, and the buildings dilapidated. He had the healthful and
## p. 7623 (#433) ###########################################
HORACE
7623
Here,
inexhaustible amusement of repairing, planting, beautifying.
under his own vine and fig-tree, he could rest his nerves from city
bores, and recuperate his digestion after city banquets. Here he
could throw himself into the interests and tickle himself with the
humors of his tenants and rustic neighbors, and easily practice the
homely hospitality in which his own soul delighted. He by no means
renounced the hospitalities of Mæcenas and the gay society of the
capital, but he reveled in possessing a safe and convenient retreat
from it all. The Sabine property was but thirty miles from Rome.
Horace never affected the aristocratic litter, but went and came
freely upon his own ambling mule, over one of the most beautiful
roads in all the world: southward across the campagna, threading
the hoary olives of the first ascent, and passing "many-fountained"
Tivoli; then up beside the Anio into the higher hills, until he turned
aside upon the left into the sunny silence of a yet more secluded
valley, that of the tributary Digentia, now Licenza.
men.
The early satires of Horace are plainly an outcome of the studies
of Archilochus which he had made at Athens; but he adopts the
measure and professes himself rather the disciple of Lucilius, the
rude forefather of the Latin satire. Of those first off-hand squibs
and sketches,-which he intimates in a passage already quoted that
he wrote for immediate pay,—it is uncertain how many he cared
afterward to include in his collected writings. The seventh satire of
the first book bears marks of having been written very early,-per-
haps while he was still playing the soldier in Greece. The third,
fourth, and tenth of the first book are in the main apologetic. They
defend the satire as the readiest and most efficient weapon of the
moralist, and as a wholesome check upon the follies and excesses of
They also proclaim his own resolve never to abuse the cen-
sor's privilege; and to indulge in no personal criticisms inconsist-
ent with the code of social honor of his age, and with a generally
kindly and tolerant view of the infirmities of humankind. The first
satire of the second book is one of the most dramatic and amusing
of the whole series. It is in the form of a dialogue with one Tre-
batius,—a rich and famous old lawyer, on the best of terms with the
powers that then were, who good-humoredly advises the poet to give
up altogether the ticklish trade of a satirist, and when he finds him-
self growing dangerously hot over the follies of the day, to reduce
his temperature by a bath in the Tiber! Great interest attaches to
the name of Horace's supposed interlocutor in this witty piece, for he
is the selfsame Trebatius for whom Cicero twenty-five years before
had procured a place on the staff of Cæsar in Gaul; who had loathed
the hardships of that country, and adroitly avoided following the
conqueror to Britain; and in whose beautiful villa at Reggio, Cicero
## p. 7624 (#434) ###########################################
7624
HORACE
had found refuge ten years later, when he was himself a fugitive
from Rome after the death of Cæsar. Trebatius was never the man
to have lost his head through any romantic adhesion to a fallen
cause; and it is positively startling to see how he preserves his
identity across a complete gap of so many years in our knowledge
of him.
All the eighteen satires of the two books, as well as most of the
Epodes, were apparently given to the world under the patronage of
Mæcenas, during the ten years or so which intervened between the
poet's introduction to that dignitary and the close of the weary civil
war by the victory of Actium. In them we find faithfully reflected
the daily life of the Roman streets, as well as the fashion of the
moment in what claimed to be the most exclusive circles of the cap-
ital. The earlier the composition, as a rule, the coarser the language
and the more caustic the tone. We fancy that we can see the
writer's expression becoming ever more suave and genial as his tem-
per mellowed with his days of modest prosperity, and his easy and
indulgent though never unmanly or ignoble philosophy of life took
shape and became a consciously accepted creed. He was never,
either in theory or practice, a very rigid moralist. He lashed men's
follies lightly and forgave their lapses freely. Himself, as judged by
the standards of the time, a clean and quiet liver, he was content to
hold up to ridicule, rather than to stern reprobation, the vices of
other men
"Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day. "
We have plenty of proof that there were moments when the gay
and facile Horace felt, no less keenly than the pensive and clair-
voyant Virgil habitually felt, the essential "emptiness," for a Roman
of that day, which followed the extinction of his civic personality.
More and more, as the years of his outwardly successful and brilliant
middle life slipped away, the patriotism of Horace became a resolutely
smothered regret; while his loves, which can never have been very
absorbing or impassioned, resolved themselves into the half amused,
half wistful recollection of transient affairs with women who had had
many lovers.
It is only when he sings of friendship, of honor and
gratitude, of faith and charity between man and man, that this con-
vinced Epicurean strikes a deeper note. The brevity of life and the
vacuity of death were ever present in the background of his thought;
but all the more was he minded to enjoy, to the full, the sunshine of
the passing day. Moderation in all things, content with the present,
courage in view of an absolutely uncertain future. - these things, in
## p. 7625 (#435) ###########################################
HORACE
7625
so far as Horace aspires to be didactic, constitute the sum and sub-
stance of his teaching.
It was inevitable that such a man, already fast bound by the
warmest of private ties to the first minister of Cæsar Octavianus,
should have accepted frankly the changed order of things when the
latter returned to Rome in 725, after the battle of Actium and the
deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, to assume the sceptre of a pacified
world. Liberty was past, and it behooved men to be thankful for
peace, and poets to praise it; believing if they could that it implied
the beginning of another age of gold. A good many of the more
respectable and better disposed Romans of that period did probably
believe this, after a fashion. The tragic note of covert warning dis-
cernible in the ode addressed by Horace (Odes, II. , x. ) to his ill-fated
friend Licinius Murena, the brother-in-law of Mæcenas, who was con-
demned and executed a few years later for conspiring against the
new government, shows how utterly wild and wanton that enterprise
must have appeared at the time. Sixty or seventy years were to
pass before the mystery of iniquity was ripe and all the vices inher-
ent in the imperial system became fully apparent; before the next
great Roman satirist, Persius, gave vent in mordant and melancholy
verse to the smothered rage of the best of the patrician remnant,
against the degrading "regiment" of their parvenu sovereigns.
Virtually, therefore, though not officially, Horace became the poet
laureate of the court which formed itself about the ruler who pres-
ently assumed the name of Augustus. All the great odes of the four
books belong to the next fifteen years; and of these, all the statelier
and more impersonal were written under imperial inspiration, and
some few, like the 'Carmen Sæculare,' and the fourth ode of the
fourth book,- which celebrates the German victories of Drusus,- in
response to direct imperial request. Yet Horace always managed to
preserve his personal freedom, and to avoid even the suspicion of
servility. He sang the triumphs of Augustus in golden numbers, but
he declined with respectful thanks the post of his private secretary.
Nor would he write an ode, to order, on the achievements of Agrippa;
but politely, if a little ironically, excused himself on the ground that
his light muse was unequal to so serious a theme (Odes, I. , vi. ).
The first book of the Epistles appeared about 731; probably be-
tween the second and third books of the Odes. The second, com-
prising the unfinished essay on the 'Art of Poetry,' was Horace's last
work, produced after he was fifty years old. His health was no longer
what it had been, and even the air of the dear valley overlooked
by pleasant Lucretilis" was becoming a trifle too brisk and bracing
for his nerves. Tibur (Tivoli) he thought suited him better, and he
prepared for himself a little installation there; but confesses in one
<<
## p. 7626 (#436) ###########################################
7626
HORACE
of his letters (Epistles, I. , viii. ) that he was restless as the wind:-
"When I am in Rome I am in love with Tibur, and when at Tibur,
with Rome. " Sometimes he longed for yet softer skies; and the
nook of earth which smiled upon him above all others "Ille terra-
rum mihi præter omnes Angulus ridet». was sunny Tarentum, with
its long spring and its gentle winter, which produced better honey
than Hymettus, better olives than leafy Venafrum, and better grapes
than Falernum itself (Odes, II. , vi. ). The end came when the poet
lacked only a few days of having completed his fifty-seventh year:
and by order of the Emperor he was laid beside Mæcenas, some-
where in the great gardens which the latter had planted upon the
redeemed Esquiline hill.
It is in the Odes that the genius of Horace finds its most perfect
expression, and through them he lives in the memory of mankind.
In them he shows himself so consummate an artist in words that
he can impart distinction even to the commonplaces of thought and
sentiment through the mere perfection of their form. His diction is
distilled to such crystalline clearness, he says what he has to say
so unapproachably and incredibly well, that his thought would be
wronged and obscured by the attempt to express it in any other
words than his own. Hence, of all poets ancient or modern, Shake-
speare alone excepted, he is perhaps most frequently quoted. The
phrase "curious felicity," applied in the age succeeding the Augus-
tan by Petronius to the style of Horace, is very apt; yet it seems
to emphasize just a little too strongly the notion of research. For
Horace's manner is after all so simple and seemingly spontaneous,
and his matter of such universal interest, that he has the effect of
addressing each reader confidentially, and making a special appeal to
him. And this air of exquisite familiarity and naturalness is the
more remarkable, because it pleased the accomplished singer of the
Odes to discard for the most part the simple iambics and hexameters
of his previous compositions, and to employ the most elaborate of
Greek lyric measures; molding in a truly miraculous manner the stiff
Latin syllables into harmony with the graces of an alien rhythm, and
now and again simply paraphrasing from the Greek. The éclat of
this feat has helped no doubt to render the adventure of translating
Horace more enticing; but he has never been adequately translated,
and it is safe to prophesy that he never will be. His qualities are
combined in too rare and subtle proportions.
The first printed edition, with date, of the works of Quintus Ho-
ratius Flaccus appeared in Milan in 1474; and almost every year in
the four hundred odd that have elapsed since then has added one
more to the devoted critics and commentators of his text.
The end-
less procession of his poetical translators comprises, in English only,
## p. 7627 (#437) ###########################################
HORACE
7627
and within our own time, such names as those of Bulwer-Lytton,
Conington, Gladstone, Sir Theodore Martin, and Sir Stephen de Vere;
while the lively paraphrases of the brothers Field of Chicago, per-
haps for the very reason that they deal with Horace so nearly in the
spirit in which he dealt with his Grecian models, appear to come
nearer, sometimes, than all the laborious efforts of more exact schol-
ars to catching the tone of the inimitable original.
The subjoined English versions are nearly all selected from these
more modern renderings, for the reason that they are upon the whole
both the most scholarly and the most successful; and an effort has
been made to present a fair idea of their comparative merits.
Harmet Traces Preston
TO LEUCONOË
O
SEEK not thou-'tis not to know- what end to me, what end
to thee
The gods have given, nor Babylonish numbers test, Leuconoë.
How better far it is to bear whatever lot for us be cast!
Or whether Jove more winters still, or whether gives he this the last,
Which now on pumice-crags opposing ever breaks th' Etruscan sea;
Be wise; strain out thy wines, and trim thine all too long expectancy
To life's brief span. Now while we speak, invidious time hath slipt
away.
O thou, as little as may be the morrow trusting, snatch to-day!
Translation of Caskie Harrison.
TO THALIARCHUS
A
SPECTRAL form Soracte stands, snow-crowned,
His shrouded pines beneath their burden bending;
Not now, his rifts descending,
Leap the wild streams, in icy fetters bound.
Heap high the logs! Pour forth with lavish hand,
O Thaliarchus, draughts of long-stored wine,
Blood of the Sabine vine!
To-day be ours: the rest the gods command.
While storms lie quelled at their rebuke, no more
Shall the old ash her shattered foliage shed,
## p. 7628 (#438) ###########################################
7628
HORACE
The cypress bow her head,
The bursting billow whiten on the shore.
Scan not the future: count as gain each day
That Fortune gives thee; and despise not, boy,
Or love, or dance, or joy
Of martial games, ere yet thy locks be gray.
Thine be the twilight vow from faltering tongue;
The joyous laugh that self-betraying guides
To where the maiden hides;
The ring from finger half resisting wrung.
O
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
TO THE SHIP OF STATE
From W. E. Gladstone's 'Odes of Horace. Copyright 1894, by Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons
SHIP! new billows sweep thee out
Seaward. What wilt thou? Hold the port, be stout!
Seest not thy mast
How rent by stiff southwestern blast?
Thy side, of rowers how forlorn!
Thine hull, with groaning yards, with rigging torn,
Can ill sustain
The fierce and ever fiercer main;
Thy gods, no more than sails entire,
From whom, yet once, thy need might aid require.
O Pontic pine,
The first of woodland stock is thine,
Yet race and name are but as dust.
Not painted sterns give storm-tost seamen trust
Unless thou dare
To be the sport of storms, beware!
Of old at best a weary weight,
A yearning care and constant strain of late,
O shun the seas
That gird those glittering Cyclades.
## p. 7629 (#439) ###########################################
HORACE
7629
C
TO CHLOE
Paraphrase out of Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
HLOE, you shun me like a hind
That, seeking vainly for her mother,
Hears danger in each breath of wind,
And wildly darts this way and t'other;
Whether the breezes sway the wood
Or lizards scuttle through the brambles,
She starts; and off as though pursued
The foolish frightened creature scrambles.
But, Chloe, you're no infant thing
That should esteem a man an ogre:
Let go your mother's apron-string
And pin your faith upon a toga!
TO VIRGIL
HY should we stem the tears that needs must flow?
WHY Why blush that they should freely flow and long
To think of that dear head in death laid low?
Do thou inspire my melancholy song.
Melpomene, in whom the Muses' sire
Joined with a liquid voice the mastery of the lyre!
And hath the sleep that knows no waking morn
Closed o'er Quinctilius,— our Quinctilius dear?
Where shall be found the man of woman born
That in desert might be esteemed his peer-
So simply meek, and yet so sternly just,
Of faith so pure, and all so absolute of trust?
He sank into his rest, bewept of many,
And but the good and noble wept for him;
But dearer cause thou, Virgil, hadst than any,
With friendship's tears thy friendless eyes to dim.
Alas, alas! not to such woeful end
Didst thou unto the gods thy prayers unceasing send!
What though thou modulate the tuneful shell
With defter skill than Orpheus of old Thrace,
## p. 7630 (#440) ###########################################
7630
HORACE
When deftliest he played, and with its spell
Moved all the listening forest from its place,
Yet never, never can thy art avail
To bring life's glowing tide back to the phantom pale
Whom, with his black, inexorable wand,
Hermes, austere and pitiless as fate,
Hath forced to join the dark and spectral band,
In their sad journey to the Stygian gate.
'Tis hard-great Heavens, how hard! But to endure
Alleviates the pang we cannot crush or cure.
Translated by Sir Theodore Martin.
TO QUINTUS DELLIUS
Paraphrase out of Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
E TRANQUIL, Dellius, I pray;
B
For though you pine your life away
With dull complaining breath,
Or speed with song and wine each day,
Still, still, your doom is death.
Where the white poplar and the pine
In glorious arching shade combine,
And the brook singing goes,
Bid them bring store of nard and wine
And garlands of the rose.
Let's live while chance and youth obtain:
Soon shall you quit this fair domain
Kissed by the Tiber's gold,
And all your earthly pride and gain
Some heedless heir shall hold.
One ghostly boat shall sometime bear
From scenes of mirthfulness or care
Each fated human soul,-
Shall waft and leave its burden where
The waves of Lethe roll.
So come, I prithee, Dellius mine;
Let's sing our songs and drink our wine
In that sequestered nook
Where the white poplar and the pine
Stand listening to the brook.
## p. 7631 (#441) ###########################################
HORACE
7631
AD AMPHORAM
O
HONEST jar! whose birth takes date,
Like mine, from Manlius's consulate,
Whether complaints or jokes they be,
Wrangling, or love's insanity,
Or quiet sleep that dwell with thee;
Beneath whatever brand 'tis thine
To bottle up choice Massic wine,
For happy day like this thou'rt fit:
Come down-Corvinus orders it—
And thy more mellow juice emit.
Though steeped in all Socratic learning,
From thee he will not, shocked, be turning.
The elder Cato oft, 'tis said,
His virtue's fire with liquor fed.
With Bacchic mirth thou layest bare
Wise men's deep counsel and their care.
Thou bring'st back hope to minds forlorn,
And vigor; and the poor man's horn
Upliftest, so that after thee
No dread of angered majesty
Or of a soldier's arms has he.
With thee shall Bacchus linger still,
And Venus (so she gladly will),
And Graces, slow to disunite,
And living lanterns, shining bright,
Till Phoebus put the stars to flight.
Translation of W. T. Thornton.
TO PHIDYLE
F, PHIDYLE, your hands you lift
I'
To heaven, as each new moon is born,
Soothing your Lares with the gift
Of slaughtered swine, and spice, and corn,
Ne'er shall Sirocco's bane assail
Your vines, nor mildew blast your wheat;
Ne'er shall your tender younglings fail
In autumn, when the fruits are sweet.
The destined victim, 'mid the snows
Of Algidus in oak woods fed,
Or where the Alban herbage grows,
Shall dye the pontiff's axes red.
## p. 7632 (#442) ###########################################
7632
HORACE
No need of butchered sheep for you
To make your homely prayers prevail!
Give but your little gods their due:
The rosemary twined with myrtle frail,
The sprinkled salt, the votive meal,
As soon their favor will regain —
Let but the hand be pure and leal-
As all the pomp of heifers slain.
Translation of John Conington.
AN INVITATION TO MECENAS
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm,' by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
D
EAR noble friend! A virgin cask
Of wine solicits your attention;
And roses fair to deck your hair,
And things too numerous to mention.
So tear yourself awhile away
From urban turmoil, pride, and splendor,
And deign to share what humble fare
And sumptuous fellowship I tender.
The sweet content retirement brings
Smooths out the ruffled front of kings.
The evil planets have combined
To make the weather hot, and hotter;
By parboiled streams the shepherd dreams
Vainly of ice-cream soda-water.
And meanwhile you, defying heat,
With patriotic ardor ponder
On what old Rome essays at home,
And what her heathen do out yonder.
Mæcenas, no such vain alarm
Disturbs the quiet of this farm!
God in his providence obscures
The goal beyond this vale of sorrow,
And smiles at men in pity when
They strive to penetrate the morrow.
With faith that all is for the best,
Let's bear what burdens are presented;
Then we shall say, let come what may,
"We die, as we have lived, contented!
## p. 7633 (#443) ###########################################
HORACE
7633
Ours is to-day; God's is the rest -
He doth ordain who knoweth best. "
Dame Fortune plays me many a prank:
When she is kind, oh, how I go it!
But if again she's harsh, why, then
I am a very proper poet.
When favoring gales bring in my ships,
I hie to Rome and live in clover;
Elsewise I steer my skiff out here
And anchor till the storm blows over.
Compulsory virtue is the charm
Of life upon the Sabine Farm!
XIII-478
HORRIDA TEMPESTAS
THROU
HROUGH narrowed skies the tempest rages loud:
A vault low-hung and roofed with cloud
Bursts forth in rain and snow. The woods, the sea,
Echo the storm from Thracian Rhodope.
-
now:
Snatch we, my friends, the fitting moment -
While strong our knees, make smooth the wrinkled brow;
Bring forth the wine of ancient date
Pressed in Torquatus's consulate;
Of toil and danger speak no more:
Some god may yet our shattered state restore!
Perfume your hair with Achæmenian balm,
And bid Cyllene's lyre your troubled spirits calm.
-
'Twas thus the noble Centaur sung :-
"Unconquered youth, from Thetis sprung,
Thyself a mortal! The Dardanian land,
And cool Scamander rippling through the sand,
And gliding Simois, call thee to their side;
Nor shall thy mother o'er her azure tide
Lead thee in triumph to thy Phthian home:
Such the weird Fate's inexorable doom.
Grieve not, my son: in song and wassail find
A soothing converse and a solace kind. "
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
## p. 7634 (#444) ###########################################
7634
HORACE
SATIRE
CHANCED that I, the other day,
I
Was sauntering up the Sacred Way,
And musing, as my habit is,
Some trivial random fantasies,
That for the time absorbed me quite,-
When there comes running up a wight,
Whom only by his name I knew:
"Ha, my dear fellow, how d'ye do? »
Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why,
As times go, pretty well,” said I:
"And you, I trust, can say the same. "
But after me as still he came,
"Sir, is there anything," I cried,
"You want of me? " "Oh," he replied,
"I'm just the man you ought to know:
A scholar, author! "-"Is it so?
For this I'll like you all the more! "
Then, writhing to evade the bore,
I quicken now my pace, now stop,
And in my servant's ear let drop
Some words, and all the while I feel
Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel.
"Oh for a touch," I moaned in pain,
«< Bolanus, of thy slap-dash vein,
To put this incubus to rout! "
As he went chattering on about
Whatever he descries or meets,
The crowds, the beauty of the streets,
The city's growth, its splendor, size,
"You're dying to be off," he cries-
For all the while I'd been struck dumb:
"I've noticed it some time. But come,
Let's clearly understand each other:
It's no use making all this pother.
My mind's made up to stick by you;
So where you go, there I go too. "
"Don't put yourself," I answered, "pray,
So very far out of your way.
I'm on the road to see a friend,
Whom you don't know, that's near his end,
Away beyond the Tiber far,
Close by where Cæsar's gardens are. "
## p. 7635 (#445) ###########################################
HORACE
7635
"I've nothing in the world to do,
And what's a paltry mile or two?
I like it, so I'll follow you! "
Now we were close on Vesta's fane;
'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane,
Was bound to answer to his bail,
Or lose his cause if he should fail.
"Do, if you love me, step aside
One moment with me here," he cried
"Upon my life, indeed I can't:
Of law I'm wholly ignorant,
And you know where I'm hurrying to. "
"I'm fairly puzzled what to do:
Give you up, or my cause. ” — “Oh, me,
Me, by all means! "-"I won't," quoth he,
And stalks on, holding by me tight.
As with your conqueror to fight
Is hard, I follow. "How," anon
He rambles off-"How get you on,
You and Mæcenas? To so few
He keeps himself. So clever, too!
No man more dexterous to seize
And use his opportunities.
Just introduce me, and you'll see
We'll pull together famously;
And hang me then, if with my backing
You don't send all your rivals packing! "
"Things in that quarter, sir, proceed
In very different style indeed.
No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not if there I spy
Men richer, better read than I.
Each has his place! "- "Amazing tact!
Scarce credible! ». "But 'tis the fact. "
―
"You quicken my desire to get
An introduction to his set. "
We ran
At the next turn against the man
Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
"Ha, knave," he cried with loud uproar,
"Where are you off to? Will you here
Stand witness? " I present my ear.
To court he hustles him along;
High words are bandied, high and strong;
## p. 7636 (#446) ###########################################
7636
HORACE
HⓇ
ORACE
――
A mob collects, the fray to see:
So did Apollo rescue me.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
CONTENTMENT
What did you think, my friend, of far-famed Lesbos and
Chios?
-
How about Samos the dainty, and Croesus's capital, Sardis ?
Colophon, too, and Smyrna? Above their fame, or beneath it?
Tiber's stream and the Campus excel them far, do you tell me?
Have you been praying for one of Attalus's cities, I wonder?
Lebedos is it you praise, of the sea and your journeyings wearied?
Bullatius- Yes! You know what Lebedos is: more dead than
Fidenæ.
Ay, or than Gabii; yet I would gladly abide there, forgetting
Those I have loved, and expecting that they in their turn will forg
me.
There I would dwell, and gaze from the shore on the furious waters.
Horace If a man travel in mud and in rain from Capua Rome-
ward,
Drenched though he be, he will choose not to tarry for life in the
tavern.
Even when chilled to the bones, we praise not the bath and the
furnace,
Truly believing that they would make life full and successful;
Nor, if impetuous Auster has tossed you about on the billow,
Would you for that get rid of your vessel beyond the Ægean.
If you are perfectly sound, then Rhodes and fair Mitylene
Help you no more than a cloak in the dog-days, trunks in midwinter,
Or in December a plunge in the Tiber, a furnace in August.
Now that you may, and the face of Fortune is smiling upon you,
Here at Rome praise far-off Rhodes, and Chios, and Samos.
This one hour that a god has bestowed upon you in his bounty,
Take with a grateful hand, nor plan next year to be happy:
So that wherever your life may be spent, you will say you enjoyed it.
For if anxieties only by reason and foresight are banished,—
Not by a spot that commands some outlook wide on the waters. —
Never our nature, but only the sky do we change as we travel.
Toilsome idleness wears us out. On wagon and shipboard
Comfort it is that we seek; yet that which you seek, it is with you,
Even in Ulubræ, if you lack not contentment of spirit.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
## p. 7637 (#447) ###########################################
HORACE
7637
HORACE'S FARM
L
EST you may question me whether my farm, most excellent Quinc-
tius,
Feeds its master with grain, or makes him rich with its olives,
Or with its orchards and pastures, or vines that cover the elm-trees,
I, in colloquial fashion, will tell you its shape and position.
Only my shadowy valley indents the continuous mountains,
Lying so that the sun at his coming looks on the right side,
Then, with retreating chariot, warming the left as he leaves it.
Surely the temperature you would praise; and what if the bushes
Bear in profusion scarlet berries, the oak and the ilex
Plentiful food for the herd provide, and shade for the master?
You would say, with its verdure, Tarentum was hither transported.
There is a fountain, deserving to give its name to a streamlet.
Not more pure nor cooler in Thrace runs winding the Hebrus.
Helpful it is to an aching head or a stomach exhausted.
Such is my ingle: sweet, and, if you believe me, delightful;
Keeping me sound and safe for you even in days of September.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
TO HIS BOOK
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm, by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
vain self-conscious little book,
Companion of my happy days,
Now eagerly you seem to look
For wider fields to spread your lays;
My desk and locks cannot contain you,
Nor blush of modesty restrain you.
YOU
Well then, begone, fool that thou art!
But do not come to me and cry,
When critics strike you to the heart,
"Oh wretched little book am I! "
You know I tried to educate you
To shun the fate that must await you.
In youth you may encounter friends,
(Pray this prediction be not wrong! )
But wait until old age descends,
And thumbs have smeared your gentlest song:
## p. 7638 (#448) ###########################################
7638
HORACE
Then will the moths connive to eat you,
And rural libraries secrete you.
However, should a friend some word
Of my obscure career request,
Tell him how deeply I was stirred
To spread my wings beyond the nest;
Take from my years, which are before you,
To boom my merits, I implore you.
Tell him that I am short and fat,
Quick in my temper, soon appeased,
With locks of gray. but what of that?
Loving the sun, with nature pleased.
I'm more than four-and-forty, hark you-
But ready for a night off, mark you!
-
THE ART OF POETRY
SU
UPPOSE, by some wild freak of fancy led,
A painter were to join a human head
To neck of horse, cull here and there a limb,
And daub on feathers various as his whim,
So that a woman, lovely to a wish,
Went tailing off into a loathsome fish:
Could you, although the artist's self were there,
From laughter long and loud, my friends, forbear?
Well, trust me, Pisos, of that freak of art
The book would be the very counterpart,
Which with a medley of wild fancies teems,
Whirling in chaos like a sick man's dreams,
A maze of forms incongruous and base,
Where naught is of a piece, naught in its place.
To dare whate'er they please has always been
The painter's, poet's, privilege, I ween.
It is a boon that any one may plead -
Myself I claim it, and in turn concede;
But 'twill not do to urge the plea too far.
To join together things that clash and jar.
The savage with the gentle, were absurd,
Or couple lamb with tiger, snake with bird.
