To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to live for. None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known so well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart and often on your lips.
Me nec tam patiens Lacedæmon, Nec tam Larissæ percussit campus opimæ, Quam domus Albuneæ resonantis Et præceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis. { 229}
So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be dearest. Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north; dearer are the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, the green round-shouldered hills.
In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover of your country, your country’s heroes, your country’s gods. None but a patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero died on an evil day, for the honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of England.
Fertur pudicæ conjugis osculum, Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor, Ab se removisse, et virilem Torvus humi posuisse voltum:
Donec labantes consilio patres Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato, Interque mærentes amicos Egregius properaret exul.
Atqui sciebat, quæ sibi barbarus Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen Dimovit obstantes propinquos, Et populum reditus morantem,
Quam si clientum longa negotia Dijudicata lite relinqueret, Tendens Venafranos in agros Aut Lacedæmonium Tarentum. { 231}
We talk of the Greeks as your teachers. Your teachers they were, but that poem could only have been written by a Roman! The strength, the tenderness, the noble and monumental resolution and resignation—these are the gifts of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.