HORACE'S LOVE POETRY.
When young, Horace threw himself ardently into the pleasures of youth; and his friends being, for the most part, young and rich, their banquets were sure to be sumptuous, and carried far into the night. Nor in these days did the "blanche aux yeux noirs," whose beauty and accomplishments formed the crowning grace of most bachelors' parties, fail to engage a liberal share of his attention. He tells us as much himself (Epistles, I. 14), when contrasting to the steward of his farm the tastes of his maturer years with the habits of his youth.
"He, whom fine clothes became, and glistering hair,
Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair,
As well you know, for his own simple sake,
Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take,
Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream
And drowse upon the grass beside a stream,"
adding, with a sententious brevity which it is hopeless to imitate, "Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum,"—
"Nor blushes that of sport he took his fill;
He'd blush, indeed, to be tomfooling still."
Again, when lamenting how little the rolling years have left him of his past (Epistles, II. 2), his regrets are for the "Venerem, convivia, ludum," to which he no longer finds himself equal—
"Years following years steal something every day,
Love, feasting, frolic, fun, they've swept away;"—
and to the first of these, life "in his hot youth" manifestly owed much of its charm.
To beauty he would appear to have been always susceptible, but his was the lightly-stirred susceptibility which is an affair of the senses rather than of the soul. "There is in truth," says Rochefoucauld, "only one kind of love; but there are a thousand different copies of it." Horace, so far at least as we can judge from his poetry, was no stranger to the spurious form of the passion, but his whole being had never been penetrated by the genuine fire. The goddess of his worship is not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but Erycina ridens, quam Jocus circum volat et Cupido, who comes
"With laughter in her eyes, and Love
And Glee around her flying."