"Oh, le bon temps! J'etais bien malheureuse!" Twice also in his later odes (IV. 1 and 13), Horace recurs with tenderness to the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount place in his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the more that she died young. _Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt_--"Few years the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles by the Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often found himself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still." In none of his love-poems is the ring of personal feeling more perceptible than in the following. It is one of his earliest, and if we are to identify the Neaera to whom it is addressed with the Neaera referred to in Ode 14, Book III., it must have been written _Consule Planco_, that is, in the year of Horace's return to Rome after the battle of Philippi.-- "'Twas night!--let me recall to thee that night! The silver moon in the unclouded sky Amid the lesser stars was shining bright, When, in the words I did adjure thee by, Thou with thy clinging arms, more tightly knit Around me than the ivy clasps the oak, Didst breathe a vow--mocking the gods with it-- A vow which, false one, thou hast foully broke; That while the ravening wolf should hunt the flocks, The shipman's foe, Orion, vex the sea, And zephyrs waft the unshorn Apollo's locks, So long wouldst thou be fond, be true to me! "Yet shall thy heart, Neaera, bleed for this, For if in Flaccus aught of man remain, Give thou another joys that once were his, Some other maid more true shall soothe his pain; Nor think again to lure him to thy heart! The pang once felt, his love is past recall; And thou, more favoured youth, whoe'er thou art, Who revell'st now in triumph o'er his fall, Though thou be rich in land and golden store, In lore a sage, with shape framed to beguile, Thy heart shall ache when, this brief fancy o'er, She seeks a new love, and I calmly smile." This is the poetry of youth, the passion of wounded vanity; but it is clearly the product of a strong personal feeling--a feeling which has more often found expression in poetry than the higher emotions of those with whom "love is love for evermore," and who have infinite pity, but no rebuke, for faithlessness. The lines have been often imitated; and in Sir Robert Aytoun's poem on "Woman's Inconstancy," the imitation has a charm not inferior to the original. "Yet do thou glory in thy choice, Thy choice of his good fortune boast; I'll neither grieve nor yet rejoice To see him gain what I have lost; The height of my disdain shall be To laugh at him, to blush for thee; To love thee still, yet go no more A-begging to a beggar's door."