sex, we can only dally with surmise
from mutilated fragments. No one else in the ancient world comes into
the account. The Middle Ages involved love inextricably with
mysticism. When Europe shook the Middle Ages off, it had begun to
think. Exquisite reflections on love, innocent pastorals, adorable
imagery,--these it could produce; in the France of the Pleiade for
instance, or in the England of Greene and Campion: but thought and
passion keep ill company. Once only, a century ago, a genius as fierce
and flame-like as that of Catullus rose to the height of this
argument. An intractable language, sterilizing surroundings, bad
models, imperfect education, left Burns hopelessly distanced; yet the
quintessential flame that he shares with Catullus has served to make
him the idol of a nation, and a household word among many millions of
his race.

Clodia, the "Lady of the Sonnets" in Catullus, whom he calls Lesbia by
a transparent fiction, has no ambiguous or veiled personality. She was
one of the most famous and most scandalous women of her time. By birth
and marriage she belonged to the innermost circle of that more than
royal Roman aristocracy which had accumulated the wealth of the world
into its hands, and sent out its younger sons carelessly to misgovern
and pillage empires. When Catullus made her acquaintance, she was a
married woman some six or seven years older than himself. "Through a
little arc of heaven" the poems show his love running its sorrowful
and splendid course. Rapture of tenderness, infatuation, revolt,
relapse, re-entanglement, agonized stupor, the stinging pain of
reviving life, fierce love passing into as fierce a hatred, all sweep
before us in dazzling language molded out of pure air and fire.

So far, Burns alone, and Burns only at his rarer heights, can give a
modern reader some idea of Catullus. But Burns had little education
and less taste; and so when he leaves the ground of direct personal
emotion,--that is to say, in nineteen-twentieths of his poetry,--he is
constantly on the edge, and often over it, of tawdriness, vulgarity,
commonplace. Catullus was master of all the technical skill then known
to poetry. Without anything approaching the immense learning of Virgil
or Milton, he had, like Shelley among English poets, the instincts and
training of a scholar. It is this fine scholarship--the eye and hand
of the trained artist in language--combined with his lucid and
imperious simplicity, like t