"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.
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