,
which he uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan age
almost dropped from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made to
suit his utterance. Yet at times he tempers the full torrent of
resonant utterance with divine tranquillity, and leaves upon our
mind that sense of powerful aloofness from his subject, which only
belongs to the mightiest poets in their most majestic moments. One
instance of this rare felicity of style shall end the list of our
quotations (v. 1194):--

O genus infelix humanum, talia divis
cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas!
quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis
volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris!
nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri
vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras
nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.
nam cum suspicimus magni caelestia mundi
templa, super stellisque micantibus aethera fixum,
et venit in mentem solis lunaeque viarum,
tunc aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura
illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit,
ne quae forte deum nobis inmensa potestas
sit, vario motu quae candida sidera verset.
temptat enim dubiam mentem rationis egestas,
ecquaenam fuerit mundi genitalis origo,
et simul ecquae sit finis, quoad moenia mundi
solliciti motus hunc possint ferre laborem,
an divinitus aeterna donata salute
perpetuo possint aevi labentia tractu
inmensi validas aevi contemnere viris.

It would be impossible to adduce from any other poet a passage in
which the deepest doubts and darkest terrors and most vexing
questions that beset the soul, are touched with an eloquence more
stately and a pathos more sublime. Without losing the sense of
humanity, we are carried off into the infinite. Such poetry is as
imperishable as the subject of which it treats.

_ANTINOUS_

Visitors to picture and sculpture galleries are haunted by the forms
of two handsome young men--Sebastian and Antinous. Both were saints:
the one of decadent Paganism, the other of mythologising
Christianity. According to the popular beliefs to which they owed
their canonisation, both suffered death in the bloom of earliest
manhood for the faith that burned in them. There is, however, this
difference between the two--that whereas Sebastian is a shadowy
creature of the pious