f bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!

So roll to each other across the ages and the continents echoes of the
Persian and the Roman bards.

Of the _beauty_ of his home he speaks always modestly; it may not
compare with Praeneste, Tarentum, Baiae; its _charm_ he is never weary
of extolling. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter and more balmy, in
summer temperate, warm in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm,
tranquillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of
country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous
city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his _home_, where he
could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says
Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is the Place of Peace."

He loved the country, yet he was no hermit. When sickened of town life
he could apostrophize the country in the beautiful lines which many a
jaded Londoner has echoed (Sat. II, vi, 60); but after some months of
its placid joys the active social side of him would re-assert itself:
the welcoming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk, its rush of
busy life, recovered their attractiveness, and for short intervals, in
the healthy season of the year, he would return to Rome. There it is
less easy to image him than in his rustic home. Nature, if spared by
man, remains unaltered; the heights and recesses of the Digentian valley
meet our eye to-day scarce changed in twenty centuries, but the busy,
crowded Rome of Horace is now only a desolate excavation. We stand upon
the "Rock of Triumph," the Capitoline Hill, looking down upon the Forum:
it lies like a stonemason's yard: stumps of pillars, fragments of brick
or marble, overthrown entablatures, pillars, altars, tangles of
staircases and enclosures, interspersed with poppies, wild oats,
trefoils, confuse and crowd it:

Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grow
Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped
On what were chambers; arch crushed, columns strown
In fragments; choked up vaults, where the owl peeped,
Deeming it midnight.

But patient, daily survey, educated by the restorations of a Lanciani,
enables us to piece together these encumbering ruins, until with
tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his walk along the Via Sacra
towards Caesar's gardens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which
must have met his view. Ev