Again, when lamenting how little the rolling years have left him of his past (Epistles, II. 2), his regrets are for the "_Venerem, convivia, ludum_," to which he no longer finds himself equal-- "Years following years steal something every day, Love, feasting, frolic, fun, they've swept away;"-- and to the first of these, life "in his hot youth" manifestly owed much of its charm. To beauty he would appear to have been always susceptible, but his was the lightly-stirred susceptibility which is an affair of the senses rather than of the soul. "There is in truth," says Rochefoucauld, "only one kind of love; but there are a thousand different copies of it." Horace, so far at least as we can judge from his poetry, was no stranger to the spurious form of the passion, but his whole being had never been penetrated by the genuine fire. The goddess of his worship is not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but _Erycina ridens, quam Jocus circum volat et Cupido,_ who comes "With laughter in her eyes, and Love And Glee around her flying." Accordingly, of all those infinitely varied chords of deep emotion and imaginative tenderness, of which occasional traces are to be found in the literature of antiquity, and with which modern poetry, from Dante to Tennyson, is familiar, no hint is to be found in his pages. His deepest feeling is at best but a ferment of the blood; it is never the all-absorbing devotion of the heart. He had learned by his own experience just enough of the tender passion to enable him to write pretty verses about it, and to rally, not unsympathetically, such of his friends as had not escaped so lightly from the flame. Therefore it is that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were, like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without the scent that breathes to the heart." We seek in them in vain for the tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which are the soul of all true love-poetry.