in these lines of clear melody the poem opens, and the rest is all a series of graceful and florid variations or embroideries upon them; the first line perpetually repeating itself through the poem like a thread of gold in the pattern or a phrase in the music. In the soft April night the tapering flame-shaped rosebud, soaked in warm dew, swells out and breaks into a fire of crimson at dawn. _Facta Cypridis de cruore deque Amoris osculo Deque gemmis deque flammis deque solis purpuris Cras ruborem qui latebat veste tectus ignea Unico marita nodo non pudebit solvere. Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet._ Flower-garlanded and myrtle-shrouded, the Spring worshippers go dancing through the fields that break before them into a sheet of flowers; among them the boy Love goes, without his torch and his arrows; amid gold- flowered broom, under trees unloosening their tresses, in myrtle-thicket and poplar shade, the whole land sings with the voices of innumerable birds. Then with a sudden sob the pageant ceases:-- _Ilia cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum? Quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?_ A second spring, in effect, was not to come for poetry till a thousand years later; once more then we hear the music of this strange poem, not now in the bronze utterance of a mature and magnificent language, but faintly and haltingly, in immature forms that yet have notes of new and piercing sweetness. _Bels dous amicx, fassam un joc novel Ins el jardi on chanton li auzel--_ so it rings out in Southern France, "in an orchard under the whitethorn leaf;" and in England, later, but yet a century before Chaucer, the same clear note is echoed, _bytuene Mershe ant Averil, whan spray bigineth to spring._ But in the Roman Empire under the Antonines the soil, the race, the language, were alike exhausted. The anarchy of the third century brought with it the wreck of the whole fabric of civilisation; and the new religion, already widely diffused and powerful, was beginning to absorb into itself on all sides the elements of thought and emotion which tended towards a new joy and a living art. VI. EARLY LATIN CHRISTIANITY: MINUCIUS FELIX, TERTULLIAN, LACTANTIUS.