Two of Horace’s admirable qualities were capability for friendship and just estimate of self. A gentle unenvious kindness radiates toward his friends. There was no condescension, superiority, no literary posing. _Friends!_ How old-fashioned the word! Are they something that vanished with the manhood of Rome? Who loves his friends! Many memories of pleasant days with them his verse recalls! We judge of their importance by the fact he deemed them worth his art. Today friendship plays slight part in life. There are spaces of the self where there is not any judgment of wrong, of right, where there remains only the observing mind. We have grown narrow, selfish, enlarged of ego. We can love only those united by ties of blood. Is there less heart? Is that a reason there are few poets? Great, ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned it to sympathetic singing. We have become drier, less inclined to giving. We are old with the world. We have less to give! At least writers can no longer picture life fatly. We have lost sight of so many things. The tide of time has swept us upon a barren shore where nothing is important save gold. The philosophic poise of Horace was universal love, perhaps, too great to be given to an individual. It touched all evenly, like light. We have missed the sunny, friendly way. We must go back. We must find it if we can, before it is too late. They who have been great, have been so by loving something better than self. The heart has share in fame. Love is productive of creative qualities such as vigor, joy. Vigor, joy, beat behind the lines of Horace.