The third of the longer poems, the sixty-third of the whole collection, is the only existing Latin poem in the difficult and complicated galliambic metre. It describes the madness of the youth Attis, who mutilates himself and gives himself up to the service of the goddess Cybele. The despair of Attis when he recovers from his madness and yearns for his country, his friends, and his past happiness, is depicted with admirable power, and the ecstatic worship of Cybele is most vividly portrayed. [Sidenote: The other long poems.] The longest poem of all describes in hexameter verse the marriage of Peleus with the sea-goddess Thetis. This is not in any sense a lyric poem, but an epyllion, or little epic. It contains passages of great beauty, but offers little opportunity for the display of the peculiarly lyric genius of Catullus, and is, on the whole, the least successful of his poems. This is followed by _The Lock of Berenice_, a translation of a poem of the same name by the Alexandrian Callimachus. Queen Berenice had cut off a lock of her hair in accordance with a vow when her husband returned safe from war. The lock disappeared from the temple in which it had been offered, and the astronomer Conon discovered it as a new constellation in the heavens. The lock of hair is supposed to speak and to yearn for its former place upon the forehead of the queen. In the preface to this poem, which is addressed to the orator Hortensius Hortalus, Catullus speaks in beautiful lines of the death of his brother: Oh, is thy voice forever hushed and still? Oh, brother, dearer far than life, shall I Behold thee never? But in sooth I will Forever love thee, as in days gone by: And ever through my songs shall ring a cry Sad with thy death, sad as in thickest shade Of intertangled boughs the melody, Which by the woful Daulian bird is made, Sobbing for Itys dead her wail through all the glade.[35] The _Lock of Berenice_ is followed by a conversation with a door, which hints at several immoral stories. The last of the longer poems is an elegy on the death of the poet’s brother, joined with the praises of his friend M’. Allius and of his beloved. This poem is remarkable for the number of digressions it contains, and in this, as in its general tone, it is an imitation of the Alexandrian style.