FullReads

We were now in the Doctor’s favorite place of resort, green, cool, quiet, and sightly withal. The keen light revealed every object in the long valley below us; the fresh west wind fluttered the oakleaves above; and the low voice of the water, coaxing or scolding its way over bare roots or mossy stones, was just audible.

“Doctor,” said I, “this spring, with the oak hanging over it, is, I suppose, your Fountain of Bandusia. You remember what Horace says of his spring, which yielded such cool refreshment when the dog-star had set the day on fire. What a fine picture he gives us of this charming feature of his little farm!”

The Doctor’s eye kindled. “I’m glad to see you like Horace; not merely as a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover of Nature. How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of his yellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grape vintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets! Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of rural beauty, each a picture in itself.”

“It is long since I have looked at my old school-day companions, the classics,” said Elder Staples; “but I remember Horace only as a light, witty, careless epicurean, famous for his lyrics in praise of Falernian wine and questionable women.”

“Somewhat too much of that, doubtless,” said the Doctor; “but to me Horace is serious and profoundly suggestive, nevertheless. Had I laid him aside on quitting college, as you did, I should perhaps have only remembered such of his epicurean lyrics as recommended themselves to the warns fancy of boyhood. Ah, Elder Staples, there was a time when the Lyces and Glyceras of the poet were no fiction to us. They played blindman’s buff with us in the farmer’s kitchen, sang with us in the meeting-house, and romped and laughed with us at huskings and quilting- parties. Grandmothers and sober spinsters as they now are, the change in us is perhaps greater than in them.”

“Too true,” replied the Elder, the smile which had just played over his pale face fading into something sadder than its habitual melancholy. “The living companions of our youth, whom we daily meet, are more strange to us than the dead in yonder graveyard. They alone remain unchanged!”

“Speaking of Horace,” continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly husky with feeling, “he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles of friends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours, and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiber or on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without a feeling of sadness. A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone of dirges, mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is bright with sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is darkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeleton sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his pleasant pictures. He was without God in the world; he had no clear abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eat and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music, and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in his view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic fictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends. Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells his illustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope, irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods to restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor persuade ‘the ghost-compelling god’ to unbar the gates of death. He urges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to his own death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus,–one of the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,–he sets before his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows. He then, in the true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance of to-morrow.”