Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found, The moss-grown rock, the pines around! And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms, Catullus and his love's alarms. _Da basia mille_, so the poem ran; And, lip to lip, our hearts began With ne'er a word translate the words complete:-- Did Lesbia find them half so sweet? A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more, And then confound the telltale score! So may we live and love, till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout. Yon failing sun shall rise another morn, And the thin moon round out her horn; But we, when once we lose our waning light,-- Ah, Love, the long unbroken night! XL JESSICA TO PHILIP A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to the classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy between the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than our ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no other gods can afford to bless them! Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts. This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my heart as warm as kisses.