thus he cries in the first intoxication of his happiness, as yet ignorant that the brief light of his love was to go out before noon. Clodia soon showed that the advice not to care for the opinion of the world was, in her case, infinitely superfluous. That intolerable pride which was the proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant disregard of all conventions. In the early days of their love, Catullus only felt, or only expressed, the beautiful side of this recklessness. His affection for Clodia had in it, he says, something of the tenderness of parents for their children; and the poems themselves bear out the paradox. We do not need to read deeply in Catullus to be assured that merely animal passion ran as strong in him as it ever did in any man. But in the earlier poems to Lesbia all this turns to air and fire; the intensity of his love melts its grosser elements into one white flame. There is hardly even a word of Lesbia's bodily beauty; her great blazing eyes have only come down to us in the sarcastic allusions made to them by Cicero in his speeches and letters. As in a few of the finest lyrics of Burns, with whom Catullus, as a poet of love, has often been compared, the ardency of passion has effected for quintessential moments the work that long ages may work out on the whole fabric of a human soul-- _Concretam exemit labem purumque reliquit aetherium sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem_. But long after the rapture had passed away the enthralment remained. Lesbia's first infidelities only riveted her lover's chains-- _Amantem iniuria talis Cogit amare magis;_ then he hangs between love and hatred, in the poise of soul immortalised by him in the famous verse-- _Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris; Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._ There were ruptures and reconciliations, and renewed ruptures and repeated returns, but through them all, while his love hardly lessens, his hatred continually grows, and the lyrical cry becomes one of the sharpest agony: through protestations of fidelity, through wails over ingratitude, he sinks at last into a stupor only broken by moans of pain. Then at last youth reasserts itself, and he is stung into new life by the knowledge that he has simply dropped out of Lesbia's existence. His final renunciation is no longer addressed to her deaf ears, but flung at her in studied insult through two of the associates of their old revels in Rome. _Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium Ilia rumpens--_ so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all-- _Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est._