Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no one suffers more than Ovid.[45] Yet he who presented the gods without seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them, has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose influence spread over western Europe. That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial[46] from the first and instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon alliteration and other consonance;[47] and his use of refrain suggests those stanza patterns set centuries later by French courtly makers in rondel[48] and ballade.[49] For though he knows the subtlest spells of sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul, and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head. Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action, but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar. Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods, are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund. For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea[50] lacks none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,[51] no appropriate gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,[52] and the golden age[53] make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?” was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had the art to repeat it[54] when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself became the pattern of these things for centuries. Not only is he forever the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must thou haste?”[55] echoed across Europe,[56] was heard in the cry of Chaucer’s Troilus[57] and Shakspere’s Juliet,[58] and still reverberates.