"Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars
Who never should have died,
A pathway cleaves among the stars,
To meaner souls denied."
But they are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of the unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what it has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which no single faculty of enjoyment should be left.
Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and how small the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized life intensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers of its hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too far forward even for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes never unaccompanied by her twin sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, this is ever in his thoughts—
"What boots it to repeat,
How Time is slipping underneath our feet?
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?".
To-day—that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings, and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glories between To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?" Horace would have hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England.
Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he does not think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn with the cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to anticipate its difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so far ahead, or to trouble himself about contingencies which may never arise. We must not think that Horace undervalued that essential quality of true statesmanship, the "animus rerum prudens" (Odes, IV. 9), the forecasting spirit that "looks into the seeds of Time," and reads the issues of events while they are still far off. He saw and prized the splendid fruits of the exercise of this very power in the growing tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But the wisest may over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working too hard, and losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness; and Horace, while urging him to escape from town for a few days, may have had it in view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, not at the common mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, who is over-anxious about the future—"ultra fas trepidat"—and to remind him that, after all,
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may."
Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of our literature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to the original may be more appropriate here:—
"Scion of Tuscan kings, in store
I've laid a cask of mellow wine,
That never has been broached before.
I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine,
And Nubian nut, that for thy hair
An oil shall yield of fragrance rare.