Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every other line has become a household word, the _Iam ver egelidos refert tepores_, and the lovely _Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque_, whose cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists, Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its opening hexameter, _Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus_, to the sobbing wail of the _Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale_ in which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of Shakespeare's sonnets. It is in these short lyrics of personal passion or emotion that the genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the _Ode to Diana_, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the _Atys_. The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner which--as in the noble fragment of Keats' _Ode to Maia_--lift it into the rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the marriage-song which stands at the end of _In Memoriam_ is than the other sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of Solomon, the verses clash and swing: _Open your bars, O gates! the bride is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!... Even so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go forth, O bride!_ And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's lap-- _Torqutatus volo parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras manus Dulce rideat ad patrem Semihiante labello--_ is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.