back to
himself"; would endow him with competence, leisure, freedom; he hailed
it as the mouse in his delightful apologue craved refuge in the country
from the splendour and the perils of the town:

Give me again my hollow tree,
A crust of bread--and liberty.

(Sat. II, 6, fin.)

SUCCESS

Horace's Sabine farm ranks high among the holy places of the classic
world; and through the labours of successive travellers, guided by the
scattered indications in his poems, its site is tolerably certain. It
was about thirty-two miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours by
pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who never allowed himself to be
hurried, the journey of a full day, or of a leisurely day and a half.
Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I,
vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of
Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus
the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose
ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid
steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites
of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven
miles would bring him to Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest,
sometimes to pass the night, possessing very probably a cottage in the
little town. No place outside his home appealed to him like this. Nine
times he mentions it, nearly always with a caressing epithet. It is
green Tibur, dew-fed Tibur, Tibur never arid, leisurely Tibur, breezy
Tibur, Tibur sloping to the sun. He bids his friend Varus plant vines in
the moist soil of his own Tiburtine patrimony there; prays that when the
sands of his life run low, he may there end his days; enumerates, in a
noble ode (Od. I, 7), the loveliest spots on earth, preferring before
them all the headlong Anio, Tibur's groves, its orchards saturated with
shifting streams.

The dark pine waves on Tibur's classic steep,
From rock to rock the headlong waters leap,
Tossing their foam on high, till leaf and flower
Glitter like emeralds in the sparkling shower.
Lovely--but lovelier from the charms that glow
Where Latium spreads her purple vales below;
The olive, smiling on the sunny hill,
The golden orchard, and the ductile rill,
The spring clear-bubbling in its rocky fount,
The mossgrown cave, the Naiad's fabled haunt,
And, far as eye can strain,