poet's knowledge, worked a madness in his brain, under the influence of which, in the prime of manhood, at forty-seven years of age, he committed suicide. It may confidently be said that the man most deeply studied in Lucretius's own poetry, will be the man most deeply impressed with the marvelous truth and power of the English poet's work. Tennyson's whole poem is worthy of the most studious attention from those who would enter into the secret of Lucretius. To such inquirers, that poem will prove a master-key of interpretation for their author, supplied by a great and kindred genius. V. HORACE is not one of the great poets of the world. But he is, emphatically, one of the best known. He does not overawe us with a vastness in his genius. But he satisfies us with far-sought perfection in his workmanship. If Homer, if Virgil, if Dante, if Milton, are each like a great statue, like a Phidian Jove-Horace is like an exquisite cameo, delighting us, not with mass, but with fineness, not with majesty, but with grace. His lines are not large, but they are clean and clear. You may use the microscope and discover no flaw. One must not look for the great thought that "strikes along the brain and flushes all the cheek." To this height Horace does not aspire. One must not even look for plenitude and variety of wisdom. Horace is wise, but he is narrowly, he is, as it were, penuriously, wise. He is worldly-wise. His reflections cling faithfully to the ground. Occasionally there is a bold stretch of wing, and a rising as if to try the eagle's flight. But the poet soon recollects himself, and descends, with conscious grace of self-control, to the safe lower level that he loves. They are Horace's odes are, many of them, perhaps the most of them, occasional poems. Few escape the quality that thus naturally belongs to them as being done to order. works of labor, quite as much as works of love. Horace's genius was so well trained, so obedient to its owner's will, that there is no revolt at task-work apparent. Deliberateness almost becomes spontaneousness. The artist's delight in execution almost becomes equivalent to the poet's delight in conception. Art, in short, is nature, with Horace. It follows from this character in Horace, that he suffers more than most other poets from translation. There is not, and there cannot be, any adequate transcript, in another language, of his verse. Thought, image, you can translate, but you cannot translate form. And form is more, than is any thing besides form, in Horace's odes. There is considerable monotony of topic and sentiment. And the sentiments that keep recurring are not very numerous, not very profound, not very novel. They are in truth the obvious, the commonplace itself, of pagan life. 'Life is short, is uncertain.. Death ends all. It is not best to fret. Take things as they come. Be contented. Moderation is wisdom. Keep the golden mean. Wealth will not make you happy.' These ideas revolve constantly into view, as you read the odes of Horace. But you do not see them in this bareness and baldness. As in a kaleidoscope, they undergo various permutation of arrangement and they take on beauty, when Horace sings them for you in his verse. This magician in metre could go on repeating himself forever, and the repetition should never weary you. You would scarcely think of its being repetition-this continuous flow from form to form of the same ideas, in the shaken kaleidoscope of Horace's verse. The experience we describe belongs, however, exclusively to the man reading the original Latin itself. No art of translation can make an equivalent experience possible to the reader of Horace in English. The Latin scholar finds the very aspect of the Horatian verse a refection to the eye. It is like looking at the fine lines of a perfect medallion, or a gem exquisitely engraved. Not in the whole round of ancient classic literature have we encountered any author from whom a greater proportion of his individual quality is lost, than is lost from Horace, in an English translation. A discouraging statement, do you say? Perhaps, say we in reply; but one obtains a truer impression of Horace by knowing this, to begin with, about him, than would be possible with any illusion in the mind of the contrary. What we have said applies, however, to the properly lyrical productions of Horace. His satires and his epistles are capable of being translated with less loss. Horace is chiefly his own biographer. We know little, and there is little that we need to know, of his life, beyond what his writings reveal. Horace is a perfectly frank egotist, the best-bred and the most agreeable of the tribe. He does not scruple to write himself, anywhere it may happen, into his verse. His audience were almost all of them personally known to the poet. He met them familiarly, at the court of Augustus, or on the streets, and in the baths, of Rome. He held a well-established and a universally recognized position, as the laureate of the empire and the lyrist and the satirist of Roman society. His natural complaisance was well supported by an unperturbed complacency. He went smiling through his easy and fortunate experience of life, the happiest, or the least unhappy, of Romans. He was a courtier ; but never was courtier compelled to pay less for what he enjoyed, than was Horace. To Horace's honor let it be also recorded, that never perhaps was successful courtier less inclined to pay any thing that could justly be judged misbecoming to himself. With apparently faultless suavity in manner, he maintained an entire manliness of bearing toward his patron Mæcenas and his emperor Augustus. It reflects credit, almost equally, both upon patronizer and patronized, this admirable relation, steadfastly sustained on the one side, and scrupulously respected on the other, between the freedman bachelor poet and those two high-placed formidable friends of his. removed by one It was his father Freedman, we say, but Horace was generation from the freedman's condition. that had once been a slave and from being a slave had been raised to a freedman. Horace praised his father with reason. The son owed much to the father. Freedman though he was, the elder Horace had ideas that became a Roman 1 citizen. He gave his boy the best chance that Rome could supply. He tasked his own resources to situate him well and to educate him as if he were the son of a Roman knight. According to the easy ethical standard that prevailed at Rome, possibly above that standard, Horace's father and, after him, Horace, seem to have been both of them true and good men. This does not mean that bachelor Horace kept himself unspotted, either in life, or in his verse. No, he did things, and he wrote things, that only to mention would now be an offense. The world is already somewhat better, when it is under sense of compulsion to seem to be better. And Christianity, since Horace's time, has at least enforced on vice a heavy fine in the form of fair pretense. Vice must now put on, however loth, a mask of virtue. Horace, as a young man, was not incapable of enthusiasm. He experienced an attack of such emotion, at the time when, Cæsar having been slain, there was a moment of promise that the Republic would be restored. He joined the republicans and fought on their side at Philippi. In one of his odes, he alludes, with not unthrifty humor, to his conduct on the occasion. He threw away his shield, he says, and ran for dear life. In such frank raillery at his own expense, he had perhaps his purpose. His republicanism, he would have it understood, was not serious enough to be either dangerous or offensive to the conquerors. Horace left the ardor of t enthusiasm behind him with his youth. Never, so far as we know, after that affair at Philippi, did he do any thing out of the safely moderate and regular. He did not cravenly fling away his spirit, but he kept his spirit in good training. He was we say, a prosperous courtier; still he remained a man you could respect. If Mæcenas hinted to him that he did not show himself enough at Rome, Horace replied, with perfect temper, that he had his reasons, and that he would rather resign the bounty that he owed to the grace of the great minister, than leave the country for the city when those reasons forbade. Mæcenas had given him a modest estate of land in the Sabine country, for which Horace-he having, as republican, lost his all through confiscation was properly grateful to his patron. He addressed Mæcenas in many appreciative and laudatory odes. He paid similar tribute to Augustus; but not through any gracious imperial condescension, did Augustus prevail to beguile the wary poet into one moment's perilous parting with the subject's safe and proper distance from the sovereign. Horace basked continuously and blessedly in the sunshine of court favor, never once pushed off for discipline into the outward cold, but also never once tempted too near into the scorching heat. The remaining incidents and relations of his life will sufficiently come out, by occasion, in connection with the pieces that we shall bring forward to illustrate his genius. Horace's poems are classified as odes, epodes, satires, and epistles. ("Epode" is a name never used by Horace himself. The late Dr. Frieze, professor of Latin in the University of Michigan, in a private note to the present writer, explained |