then he hangs between love and hatred, in the poise of soul immortalised by him in the famous verse—
Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris;
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
There were ruptures and reconciliations, and renewed ruptures and repeated returns, but through them all, while his love hardly lessens, his hatred continually grows, and the lyrical cry becomes one of the sharpest agony: through protestations of fidelity, through wails over ingratitude, he sinks at last into a stupor only broken by moans of pain. Then at last youth reasserts itself, and he is stung into new life by the knowledge that he has simply dropped out of Lesbia's existence. His final renunciation is no longer addressed to her deaf ears, but flung at her in studied insult through two of the associates of their old revels in Rome.
Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis
Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos
Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium
Ilia rumpens—
so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all—
Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem
Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est.
Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every other line has become a household word, the Iam ver egelidos refert tepores, and the lovely Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque, whose cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists, Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its opening hexameter, Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus, to the sobbing wail of the Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale in which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of Shakespeare's sonnets.
It is in these short lyrics of personal passion or emotion that the genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the Ode to Diana, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the Atys. The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner which—as in the noble fragment of Keats' Ode to Maia—lift it into the rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the marriage-song which stands at the end of In Memoriam is than the other sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of Solomon, the verses clash and swing: Open your bars, O gates! the bride is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!… Even so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go forth, O bride! And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's lap—
Torqutatus volo parvulus
Matris e gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semihiante labello—
is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.