S_eek not to pierce the morrow's haze,_ B_ut for the moment render praise;_ N_or spurn the dance, nor love's sweet passion,_ E_re age draws on with its joyless days._ N_ow should the campus be your joy,_ A_nd whispered loves your lips employ,_ W_hat time the twilight shadows gather,_ A_nd tryst you keep with the maiden coy._ F_rom near-by nook her laugh makes plain_ W_here she had meant to hide, in vain!_ H_ow arch her struggles o'er the token_ F_rom yielding which she can scarce refrain!_ _iii_. LIFE AND MORALITY But Horace's Epicureanism never goes to the length of Omar's. He would have shrunk from the Persian as extreme: "YESTERDAY _This Day's Madness did prepare_, TOMORROW'S _Silence, Triumph, or Despair_, _Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why_: D_rink! for you know not why you go, nor where_." The Epicureanism of Horace is more nearly that of Epicurus himself, the saintly recluse who taught that "to whom little is not enough, nothing is enough," and who regarded plain living as at the same time a duty and a happiness. The lives of too liberal disciples have been a slander on the name of Epicurus. Horace is not among them. With degenerate Epicureans, whose philosophy permitted them "To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty," he had little in common. The extraction from life of the honey of enjoyment was indeed the highest purpose, but the purpose could never be realized without the exercise of discrimination, moderation, and a measure of spiritual culture. Life was an art, symmetrical, unified, reposeful,--like the poem of perfect art, or the statue, or the temple. In actual conduct, the hedonist of the better type differed little from the Stoic himself. The gracious touch and quiet humor with which Horace treats even the most serious themes are often misleading. This effect is the more possible by reason of the presence among his works of passages, not many and for the most part youthful, in which he is guilty of too great freedom. Horace is really a serious person. He is even something of a preacher, a praiser of the time when he was a boy, a censor and corrector of his youngers. So far as popular definitions of Stoic and Epicurean are concerned, he is much more the former than the latter. For Horace's counsel is always for moderation, and sometimes for austerity. He is not a wine-bibber, and he is not a total abstainer. To be the latter on principle would never have occurred to him. The vine was the gift of God. Prefer nothing to it for planting in the mellow soil of Tibur, Varus; it is one of the compensations of life: