The philosophy, the thinking, of that antique day was muscled. It was sure, unwavering in line, as marbles. They had a firmer grasp upon life, _the fact_. We find Horace firm amid the shifting present. We can not find poetry so satisfying as his calm surveyal of things as they are. The pagan’s philosophic view of the inevitable, the nothingness which confronts man, tempered their natures. It made them truer, fonder, more pitiful. Regret for loss by death was greater. They lived like guests flower-crowned at a banquet, unseen above whose head Fate shoots death’s arrows down. Therefore it was pleasant to grasp hands, feel sympathy. Christianity has weakened friendship. Strangely enough it has made us love each other less. Having God we do not need man. At times Horace is soberly meditative, but he is seldom sad with haunting modern sadness. Perhaps blitheness was pagan sadness, too deep for tears. He was not subject to blues, ill temper. A cultivated pagan did not take these liberties with himself or others. Byronic madness had not come. Reason still had power. Time was precious. There was not a heaven in which to find it restored. We are misers with dollars, in addition to being foolish egoists. They were wiser misers with time, with its joy. It is pleasant, occasionally, to dream back into this serene age, to move, a little space, among calm, griefless white Wedgewood-figures that have given over regret, that neither hope nor fear, yet whose joy was tempered by clear consciousness of the end. No one can see all things from the beginning. We must be satisfied with the day’s vision. Horace had a calm, disillusioned mind, without ideals. Life was too short to grow vain things. Ideals were insistent, therefore bad taste. The world was as it was. He could remake, change nothing. For this reason he decided to be _the poet of things as they are_. In the literatures of Greece and Rome there are no diseases of the spirit. There is no questioning of the supreme facts of existence. They are sane. They are models of right seeing. No energy is wasted in rebellion. Their charm is not that of a wild, erratic view point for the glorifying of self. A thing to be good had to be something besides _new_. _L’art nouveau_ would have met disdain. They are sane with nature’s unchanging sanity which we are losing. They do not strain the mind to acrobatic seeing. Novelty was not synonymous with quality. This body, this life, belong to earth where they are placed. It is well not to tamper things that do not concern us. Not without reason was the box of Pandora closed. Whenever we open it, we find a new ill. Take things as they are. Be happy. It is sad we can not make pagan sanity contagious as our questioning restlessness.