writes Andrew Lang, in _Letters to Dead Authors_, "what delight of life, what an exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is fair in the glittering stream, the music of the water-fall, the hum of bees, the silvery gray of the olive woods on the hillside! How human are all your verses, Horace! What a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars, swaying in the wind! What gladness you gain from the white crest of Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are being piled higher on the hearth!... None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known as well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart, and often on your lips. 'Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by the wandering rills.' So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be dearest. Beautiful is Italy, with the grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls: beautiful is Italy, her seas and her suns." _ii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN LIVING Again, in its visualization of the life of Italy, Horace's art is no less clear than in the presentation of her scenery. Where else may be seen so many vivid incidental pictures of men at their daily occupations of work or play? In _Satire_ and _Epistle_ this is to be expected, though there are satirists and writers of letters who never transfer the colors of life to their canvas; but the lyrics, too, are kaleidoscopic with scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleeting but vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the sportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy thrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside, the anxious mother at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyes from the curved shore, the husbandman passing industrious days on his own hillside, tilling his own acres with his own oxen, and training the vine to the unwedded tree, the young men of the hill-towns carrying bundles of fagots along rocky slopes, the rural holiday and its festivities, the sun-browned wife making ready the evening meal against the coming of the tired peasant. We are shown all the quaint and quiet life of the countryside.