is in the strongest possible contrast to that powerful passion which fills the poetry of Catullus, or to the romantic tenderness of the Eclogues; and in the extraordinary couplet—
Me sine, quem semper voluit fortuna iacere, Hanc animam extremae reddere nequitiae,
"the expense of spirit in a waste of shame" reaches its culminating point. This tremulous self-absorption, rather than any defect of eye or imagination, is the reason of the extraordinary lapses which now and then he makes both in description and in sentiment. The vivid and picturesque sketches he gives of fashionable life at watering-places and country- houses in the eleventh and fourteenth elegies, or single touches, like that in the remarkable couplet—
Me mediae noctes, me sidera prona iacentem, Frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu,
show that where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or, if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous training and self-criticism in which Virgil and Horace spent their lives, he made on the whole but a weak and ineffective use of a natural gift perhaps equal to either of theirs. Thus it is that his earliest work is at the same time his most fascinating and brilliant. After the Cynthia he rapidly became, in the mordant phrase used by Heine of Musset, un jeune homme d'un bien beau passé. Some premonition of early death seems to have haunted him; and the want of self-control in his poetry may reflect actual physical weakness united with his vivid imagination.
The second and third books of the Elegies,[9] though they show some technical advance, and are without the puerilities which here and there occur in the Cynthia, are on the whole immensely inferior to it in interest and charm. There is still an occasional line of splendid beauty, like the wonderful—
Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum;
an occasional passage of stately rhythm, like the lines beginning—
Quandocunque igitur nostros mors clausit ocellos;
but the smooth versification has now few surprises; the learning is becoming more mechanical; there is a tendency to say over again what he had said before, and not to say it quite so well.