Perdidit urbes.”
This stanza is so foreign from the spirit of high excitation in which the preceding part of the ode is written, that Maffei suspected it had belonged to some other poem of Catullus; and Handius, in his Observationes Criticæ, conjectures that the fourth stanza, which Catullus translated from the original Greek, having been lost, and a chasm being thus left, some idle librarian or scholiast of the middle ages had interpolated these four lines of misplaced morality, that no gap might appear in his manuscript[492]. It is not impossible, however, that this verse may have been intended to express the answer of the poet’s mistress.
Many amatory poets have tried to imitate this celebrated ode; but most of them have failed of success. Boileau has also attempted this far-famed fragment; but although he has produced an elegant enough poem, he has not expressed the vehement passion of the Greek original so happily as Catullus. How different are the rapidity and emotion of the following stanza,
“Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
Flamma dimanat, sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures—gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte,”
from the languor of the corresponding lines of the French poet!
“Une nuage confus se repand sur ma vue,
Je n’entend plus, je tombe en de douces langueurs,