ng. The sentiment is paler and more artificial, but
the old condensation and felicity remain. He begins with rather sad
reluctance. He is old; the one woman whom he loved is dead; his lyric
raptures and his love campaignings are at an end; he is tired of
flattering hopes, of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew.
Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are wanted? There he is
more helpless still. It needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is
no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of the Theban bard. And yet,
as chosen lyrist of the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the
call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked him for her own, can still
shed on him if she will the power to charm, can inspire in him "music of
the swan." So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire revives; we get the
martial odes to conquering Drusus and to Lollius, the panegyrics on
Augustus and Tiberius, all breathing proud consciousness that "the Muse
opens the good man's grave and lifts him to the gods"; that immortality
can be won only by the poet's pen, and that it is in his own power to
confer it.

[Illustration: _Becchetti photo._

THE FORUM RESTORED AS IN A.D. 80.

(Reproduced by special permission.)]

The remaining poems are in the old spirit, but are somewhat mournful
echoes of the past. They remind us of the robin's winter song--"Hark to
him weeping," say the country folk, as they listen to the music which
retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of
the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now
"come to bless thy worshipper"; but "leave an old heart made callous by
fifty years, and seek some younger votary." There is an ode to Spring.
Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him
charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message
is that change and death attend all human hopes and cares. Like an army
defeated, the snow has retreated; the Graces and the Nymphs can dance
unclad in the soft warm air. But summer will thrust out spring, autumn
summer, then dull winter will come again; will come to the year, will
come to you and me. Not birth nor eloquence nor virtue can save from
Minos' judgement seat; like Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, like all the great
ones of the earth, we shall soon be nameless shades and a poor pinch of
dust. More of the old buoyant glee comes back in a festal invitation
to one Virgilius, not the poet. There is a r