"Ask not—such lore's forbidden—
What destined term may be
Within the future hidden
For us, Leuconöe.
Both thou and I
Must quickly die!
Content thee, then, nor madly hope
To wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope.
"Far nobler, better were it,
Whate'er may be in store,
With soul serene to bear it,
If winters many more
Jove spare for thee,
Or this shall be
The last, that now with sullen roar
Scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rock-bound shore.
"Be wise, your spirit firing
With cups of tempered wine,
And hopes afar aspiring
In compass brief confine,
Use all life's powers;
The envious hours
Fly as we talk; then live to-day,
Nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must or may."
In the verses of Horace we are perpetually reminded that our life is compassed round with darkness, but he will not suffer this darkness to overshadow his cheerfulness. On the contrary, the beautiful world, and the delights it offers, are made to stand out, as it were, in brighter relief against the gloom of Orcus. Thus, for example, this very gloom is made the background in the following Ode (I. 4) for the brilliant pictures which crowd on the poet's fancy with the first burst of Spring. Here, he says, oh Sestius, all is fresh and joyous, luxuriant and lovely! Be happy, drink in "at every pore the spirit of the season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it of its sweets.
"As biting Winter flies, lo! Spring with sunny skies,
And balmy airs; and barks long dry put out again from shore;
Now the ox forsakes his byre, and the husbandman his fire,
And daisy-dappled meadows bloom where winter frosts lay hoar.
"By Cytherea led, while the moon shines overhead,
The Nymphs and Graces, hand-in-hand, with alternating feet
Shake the ground, while swinking Vulcan strikes the sparkles fierce
and red From the forges of the Cyclops, with reiterated beat.
"'Tis the time with myrtle green to bind our glistening locks,
Or with flowers, wherein the loosened earth herself hath newly
dressed, And to sacrifice to Faunus in some glade amidst the rocks
A yearling lamb, or else a kid, if such delight him best.
"Death comes alike to all—to the monarch's lordly hall,
Or the hovel of the beggar, and his summons none shall stay.
Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pass;
Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day.
"Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd,
And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in;
And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there,
Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win."
A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the last two verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would of placing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or of decorating his ball-room with Holbein's "Dance of Death." We rebuke our pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, and our poets use it to remind us that
"The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things."
Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the flying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on this side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble, than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the general belief. "Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos,"—
"The Manes are no dream; death closes not
Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade
Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires,"
says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades—in the "domus exilis Plutonia;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across the Styx; in the "judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas piorum"—the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, passionate life of this world. The nobler spirits of antiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future state than this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest in the conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to be the "be all and the end all" of existence, or that those whom they had loved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had never been. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusion from such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust, "pulvis et umbra sumus!" or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness and purity is suddenly struck down—"Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget?"—"And is Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?" We might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a life after death because he makes Prospero say—
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,—who, as a rule, is wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however much it may have engaged his speculations,—has gleams not unlike those which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of "Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter via"—