We cannot, perhaps, share his enthusiasm in the minute description that follows of the coloured marbles used in the decoration of the house, and his panegyric of Pollius leaves us cold, but we quit the poem with a pleasant impression of the Bay of Naples and of the poet who loved it so well. It recalls in its way the charming, if over-elaborate and exaggerated, landscapes of the younger Pliny in his letters on the source of the Clitumnus and on his Tuscan and Laurentine villas.[587] But it is in two poems of a very different kind that the _Silvae_ reach their high-water mark. The _Genethliacon_ _Lucani_, despite its artificial form and the literary conventions with which it is overloaded, reveals a genuine enthusiasm for the dead poet, and is couched in language of the utmost grace and verse of extraordinary melody; the hendecasyllables of Statius lack the poignant vigour of the Catullan hendecasyllables, but they have a music of their own which is scarcely less remarkable.[588] The lament of Calliope for her lost nursling will hold its own with anything of a similar kind produced by the Silver Age (ii 7. 88): 'o saevae nimium gravesque Parcae! o numquam data longa fata summis! cur plus, ardua, casibus patetis? cur saeva vice magna non senescunt? sic natum Nasamonii Tonantis post ortus obitusque fulminatos angusto Babylon premit sepulcro. sic fixum Paridis manu trementis Peliden Thetis horruit cadentem. sic ripis ego murmurantis Hebri non mutum caput Orpheos sequebar sic et tu (rabidi nefas tyranni!) iussus praecipitem subire Lethen, dum pugnas canis arduaque voce das solatia grandibus sepulcris, (o dirum scelus! o scelus!) tacebis.' sic fata est leviterque decidentes abrasit lacrimas nitente plectro. 'Ah! fates severe and all too cruel! O life that for our noblest ne'er is long! Why are earth's loftiest most prone to fall? Why by hard fate do her great ones ne'er grow old? Even so the Nasamonian Thunderer's son like lightning rose, like lightning passed away, and now is laid in a narrow tomb at Babylon. So Thetis shuddered, when the son of Peleus fell transfixed by Paris' coward hand. So I, too, by the banks of murmuring Hebrus followed the head of Orpheus that could not cease from song. So now must thou--out on the mad tyrant's crime!--go down untimely to the wave of Lethe, and while thou singest of war and with lofty strain givest comfort to the sepulchres of the mighty,--O infamy, O monstrous infamy!--art doomed to sudden silence.' So spake she, and with gleaming quill wiped away the tears that gently fell. But more beautiful as pure poetry, and indeed unique in Latin, is the well-known invocation to Sleep (v. 4):