Part 10 (2/2)

To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to live for. None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known so 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 pa.s.sage, 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 nec tam patiens Lacedaemon, Nec tam Larissae percussit campus opimae, Quam domus Albuneae resonantis Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis. (1)

(1) '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: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north; dearer is the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tanny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, the green round-shouldered hills.

In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover of your country, your country's heroes, your country's G.o.ds. None but a patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero died, on an evil day for the honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of England.

Fertur pudicae conjujis osculum, Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor, Ab se removisse, et virilem Torvus humi pusuisse voltum:

Donec labantes consilio patres Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato, Interque maerentes amicos Egregius properaret exul.

Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen Dimovit obstantes propinquos, Et populum reditus morantem,

Quam si clientum longa negotia Dijudicata lite relinqueret, Tendens Venafranos in agros Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. (1)

(1) 'They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile. Yet well he knew what things were being prepared for him at the hands of the tormenters, who, none the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the people that would fain have held him back, pa.s.sing through their midst as he might have done, if, his retainers' weary business ended and the suits adjudged, he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.'

We talk of the Greeks as your teachers. Your teachers they were, but that poem could only have been written by a Roman! The strength, the tenderness, the n.o.ble and monumental resolution and resignation--these are the gift of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.

Your country's heroes are dear to you, Horace, but you did not sing them better than your country's G.o.ds, the pious protecting spirits of the hearth, the farm, the field, kindly ghosts, it may be, of Latin fathers dead or G.o.ds framed in the image of these. What you actually believed we know not, _you_ knew not. Who knows what he believes? _Parcus Deorum cultor_ you bowed not often, it may be, in the temples of the state religion and before the statues of the great Olympians; but the pure and pious wors.h.i.+p of rustic tradition, the faith handed down by the homely elders, with that you never broke. Clean hands and a pure heart, these, with a sacred cake and s.h.i.+ning grains of salt, you could offer to the Lares. It was a benignant religion, uniting old times and new, men living and men long dead and gone, in a kind of service and sacrifice solemn yet familiar.

Te nihil attinet Tentare multa caede bidentium Parvos coronantem marino Rore deos fragilique myrto.

Immunis aram si tetigit ma.n.u.s, Non sumptuosa blandior hostia Mollivit aversos Penates Farre pio et salienta mica. (1)

(1) Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the G.o.ds with slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny deities with myrtle rare and rosemary. If but the hand be clean that touches the altar, then richest sacrifice will not more appease the angered Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles in the blaze.'

Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; of mortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so many generations of men.

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