are drawn with the truest and most delicate hand.
The whole conception and execution of this poem, as also of the Attis and of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, leave no doubt that Catullus was richly endowed with the vision and the faculty of genius, as well as with impassioned feeling and the gift of musical expression.
The poem which immediately follows is also an Epithalamium, intended to be sung by young men and maidens, in alternate parts. It is written in hexameter verse, and in rhythm, thought, and feeling resembles some of the golden fragments from the Epithalamia of Sappho. The whole poem sounds like a song in a rich idyll. Its charm consists in its calm and mellow tone, in the dramatic truth with which the feelings and thoughts natural to the young men and maidens are alternately expressed, and especially in the beauty of its two famous similes. In the first of these a flower is again the symbol of the bloom and innocence of maidenhood, growing up apart and safe from all rude contact. The idea in the concluding lines of the simile—
Idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui,
Nulli illum pueri, nullae optavere puellae,—
may probably have been suggested by a passage in Sappho, of which these two lines remain,
οἵαν τὰν ὑάκινθον ἐν ὤρεσι ποιμένες ἄνδρες
ποσσὶ καταστείβοισι, χαμαὶ δέ τε πόρφυρον ἄνθος.
In the second simile, which is supposed to be spoken by the young men, the vine growing upon a bare field, scarcely rising above the ground, unheeded and untended, is compared to the maid who