Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart their choicest impulses. What rapture inspires and informs the lines to his yacht, and to Sirmio, as well as the _Jam ver egelidos refert tepores_! As the author of the _Attis_ Catullus stands alone among poets. There was, so far as we know, nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. If it be a study from the Greek, as it is generally supposed to be, it is very difficult to conjecture at what period its original could have been produced. There is nothing at all resembling it which has come down from the lyric period; its theme is not one which would have been likely to attract the Attic poets. If its model was the work of some Alexandrian, we can only say that such a poem must have been an even greater anomaly in that literature than Smart’s _Song to David_ is to our own literature, in the eighteenth century. It may, of course, be urged that it is equally anomalous in Latin poetry, and that, if resolved into its elements, it has much more affinity with what may be traced to Greek than to Roman sources. In its compound epithets, and more particularly in the singular use of “foro,” so plainly substituted for the Greek αγορα and its associations, it certainly reads like a translation from the Greek; and yet, in the total impression made by it, the poem has not the air of a translation, but of an original, and of an original struck out, in inspiration, at white heat. Only by an extraordinary effort of imaginative sympathy are we now able to realize to ourselves the tragedy of the _Attis_, while its rushing galliambics whirl us through the panorama of its swift-succeeding pictures. But home to every heart must come the poems which Catullus dedicates to the memory of his brother, and the poem in which he tries to soothe Calvus for the death of Quintilia. Multas per gentes, et multa per aequora vectus Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis, Et mutum nequidquam alloquerer cinerem: Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum: Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi! Nunc tamen interea prisco quæ more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe, fraterno multum manantia fletu: Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. “Many are the peoples, many the seas I have passed through to be here, dear brother, at this, thine untimely grave, that I might pay thee death’s last tribute, and greet,--how vainly,--the dust that has no response. For well I know Fortune hath bereft me of thy living self--Ah! hapless brother, cruelly torn from me! Yet here, see, be the offerings which, from of old, the custom of our fathers hath handed down as a sad oblation to the grave--take them--they are streaming with a brother’s tears. And now--for evermore--brother, hail and farewell!”