Of a very different character, but of a beauty that is nothing less than startling in its sombre surroundings, is the blessing that he invokes on the good men of old who 'enthroned the teacher in the revered parent's place'. di maiorum umbris tenuem et sine pondere terram spirantesque crocos et in urna perpetuum ver, qui praeceptorem sancti voluere parentis esse loco (vii. 207). Shades of our sires! O sacred be your rest, And lightly lie the turf upon your breast! Flowers round your urns breathe sweets beyond compare, And spring eternal shed its influence there! You honoured tutors, now a slighted race, And gave them all a parent's power and place. GIFFORD. The sensuous appeal of the 'fragrant crocus and the spring that dies not in the urn of death' is unique in Juvenal. This slender stream of definitely poetic imagination reveals itself suddenly and unexpectedly in strange forms and circumstances. At the close of the passage in the third satire describing the perils of the Roman streets, Juvenal imagines the death of some householder in a street accident. All is bustle and business at home in expectation of his return: domus interea secura patellas iam lavat et bucca foculum excitat et sonat unctis striglibus et pleno componit lintea guto. haec inter pueros varie properantur, at ille iam sedet in ripa taetrumque novicius horret porthmea nec sperat caenosi gurgitis alnum infelix nec habet quem porrigat ore trientem (iii. 261). Meantime, unknowing of their fellow's fate, The servants wash the platter, scour the plate, Then blow the fire with puffing cheeks, and lay The rubbers and the bathing-sheets display, And oil them first, each handy in his way. But he for whom this busy care they take, Poor ghost! is wandering by the Stygian lake; Affrighted by the ferryman's grim face, New to the horrors of the fearful place, His passage begs, with unregarded prayer, And wants two farthings to discharge his fare. DRYDEN. Out of the grotesque there gradually looms the horror of death and the friendless ghost sitting lost and homeless by the Stygian waters. That there is small scope in his work for such distinctively poetic imagination is not Juvenal's fault, nor can we complain of its absence. But in technical accomplishment he shows himself a writer of the first rank. His treatment of the hexameter exactly suits his declamatory type of satire. The conversational verse of Horace, with its easy-going rambling gait, was unsuitable for the thunders of Juvenal's rhetoric. Something more massive in structure, more vigorous in movement, was needed as the vehicle of so much rhetoric and invective. The delicate tripping hexameter of contemporary epic was equally unsuitable.