And now 'tis done: more durable than brass My monument shall be, and raise its head O'er royal pyramids: it shall not dread Corroding rain or angry Boreas, Nor the long lapse of immemorial time. I shall not wholly die; large residue Shall 'scape the Queen of funerals. Ever new My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb With silent maids the Capitolian height. "Born," men will say, "where Aufidus is loved, Where Danaus scant of streams beneath him bowed The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright, First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay To notes of Italy." Put glory on, My own Melpomene, by genius won, And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay. SWAN SONG When a well-graced actor has left the stage amid trumpeted farewells from an admiring but regretful audience, we somewhat resent his occasional later reappearance. So, when a poet's last word has been spoken, and spoken emotionally, an Afterword is apt to offend: and we may wish that the fine poem just quoted had been reserved as finish to the volume yet to come, which lacks a closing note, or even that the volume itself had not been published. The fourth Book of the Odes was written nearly ten years after the other three, and Horace wrote it not as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn appeared in B.C. 17, when he was forty-eight years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, over the tribes of the Eastern Alps. If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had not lost its cunning. The sentiment is paler and more artificial, but the old condensation and felicity remain. He begins with rather sad reluctance. He is old; the one woman whom he loved is dead; his lyric raptures and his love campaignings are at an end; he is tired of flattering hopes, of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew. Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are wanted? There he is more helpless still. It needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of the Theban bard. And yet, as chosen lyrist of the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked him for her own, can still shed on him if she will the power to charm, can inspire in him "music of the swan." So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire revives; we get the martial odes to conquering Drusus and to Lollius, the panegyrics on Augustus and Tiberius, all breathing proud consciousness that "the Muse opens the good man's grave and lifts him to the gods"; that immortality can be won only by the poet's pen, and that it is in his own power to confer it. [Illustration: _Becchetti photo._ THE FORUM RESTORED AS IN A.D. 80. (Reproduced by special permission.)]