That Jove and all the gods have heard our prayer,
And with approving smiles our homage hail:
We, skilled in choral harmonies to raise
The hymn to Phoebus and Diana's praise.
Of course in all this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley, scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality. There might be a shadowy world—the poets said so—Odysseus visited its depths and brought back its report—but it was a gloomy place at best. Horace alludes to it always in the tone of the Hebrew Psalmists, or of Hezekiah sick to death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tantalus and Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are pitiless—we can only bear bereavements patiently (II, iii). You must leave, my Dellius, your pleasant groves and your cottage upon Tiber's banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops equally on all:
Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left;
And cypresses abhorred,
Alone of all the trees
That now your fancy please,
Shall shade his dust who was awhile their lord.