Horace and His Influence | Page 9

the snow-covered uplands of the Alban hills, the mead sparkling with
hoar-frost at the approach of spring, autumn rearing from the fields her
head decorous with mellow fruits, and golden abundance pouring forth
from a full horn her treasures upon the land. It is real Italy which
Horace cuts on his cameos,--real landscape, real flowers and fruits, real
men.
"What joy there is in these songs!"
writes Andrew Lang, in Letters to Dead Authors, "what delight of life,
what an exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure,
what tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is
fair in the glittering stream, the music of the water-fall, the hum of bees,
the silvery gray of the olive woods on the hillside! How human are all
your verses, Horace! What a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars,
swaying in the wind! What gladness you gain from the white crest of
Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are
being piled higher on the hearth!... None of the Latin poets your
fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known as well as you,
Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy. You
do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numbering the
glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress.
But the sentiment is ever in your heart, and often on your lips. 'Me
neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean plain so enraptures as the
fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the
orchards watered by the wandering rills.' So a poet should speak, and to
every singer his own land should be dearest. Beautiful is Italy, with the
grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her dark groves, her little
cities perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient
walls: beautiful is Italy, her seas and her suns."
ii. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN LIVING
Again, in its visualization of the life of Italy, Horace's art is no less
clear than in the presentation of her scenery. Where else may be seen so

many vivid incidental pictures of men at their daily occupations of
work or play? In Satire and Epistle this is to be expected, though there
are satirists and writers of letters who never transfer the colors of life to
their canvas; but the lyrics, too, are kaleidoscopic with scenes from the
daily round of human life. We are given fleeting but vivid glimpses
into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the sportsman in chase of
the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy thrush, the serenader
under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside, the anxious mother
at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyes from the curved shore,
the husbandman passing industrious days on his own hillside, tilling his
own acres with his own oxen, and training the vine to the unwedded
tree, the young men of the hill-towns carrying bundles of fagots along
rocky slopes, the rural holiday and its festivities, the sun-browned wife
making ready the evening meal against the coming of the tired peasant.
We are shown all the quaint and quiet life of the countryside.
The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort which
for all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of the
country mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that
ate until he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the
rustic who sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called
man to aid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most
formal and dignified of the Odes are not without the mellow charm of
Italian landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first
six Odes of the third book, often called the Inaugural Odes, we get
such glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius
on election day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships
under the open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and the
low-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood of
Voltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and the stern
patriotism of Regulus. Without these the Inaugurals would be but
barren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against the
domestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat and
picturesqueness:
'Twas not the sons of parents such as these That tinged with Punic
blood the rolling seas, L_aid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought_

G_reat Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught_;
But the