Driver of light, courier of the bright pole, Surveyor of the sky, and hour-divider, Servant of time, circler perpetual, Cleanser of earth, disperser of the clouds, Ever your chariot, fiery four-in-hand, You curb fast; you who bear on the bright day Steal from the world once more your countenance And of your glowing hair conceal the flame; Tomorrow from the arms of Tethys you Return once more: but night has sealed my sun. By my _sun_ he means Douza. And again: Sweet children of the night, brothers of fire, Small cohorts, citizens of the fiery pole, Who wandering through the cloudless fields of air Lead the soft choruses with a light foot When our tired bodies are stretched softly out And gentle sleep invades our conquered sense, Why now as then through the enamelled halls From the recesses, still, and the clear windows Of the gold arch bear off his hallowed face? Farewell, at last; you shall not see your Douza.[7] In these epigrams, apart from the metaphors heaped up _ad nauseam_, and each of them harsh and absurd, a keen critic has noted another fault: namely, that nothing is more distant from the spirit of a man grieving and mourning for the death of a friend--and this is what Heinsius intended to depict--than such a wantonness of epithets. And so much for diction. _Truth, the primary virtue of ideas. How great a fault there is in untruth. Thence, of false epigrams._ We take up now the question of ideas, and postulate again that these too must conform both to the subject and to men's character. Ideas agree with the subject if they are true, if they are appropriate, and if they so to speak get into the insides of the thing. They are in accord with men's character if they fit in with natural aversions or desires. The primary virtue of ideas is truth. Whatever is false is at variance with external reality, nor is there any beauty in falsity except in so far as it pretends to truth. From this you may gather that truth is the source of beauty, falsity of ugliness. The latter, in fact, is out of keeping not only with reality but also with human nature. For we possess an innate love of truth and an aversion to falsehood, so that what delights us when it seems to be true becomes disagreeable and unpleasant when its falseness is made manifest. This principle applies to those learned men whom we have mentioned several times now, and has led to the exclusion from this anthology of many epigrams in which the point rests on a falsehood: for example, there is the well-known one by Grotius, though simply as a poem it is noble enough: _On Joan of Arc, who is called "La pucelle d'Orleans"_