Early a note of weariness creeps into his verses, a regretful, late-autumn splendor. It is like light upon rich fields of grain that have been reaped. His life was loveless, given over to men. This was not unusual in his age. Was it this that made his nature cold, and nothing worth while? Love was possible in pagan days and wrought havoc. Catullus knew how to love. So did Propertius, Tibullus. It was not wholly the age. We get impression that he feels old and is weary, even of pleasure, song, when we know he must have been under fifty. Was it because his body was delicate, frail, as we find hint now and then, or were his senses superfine, easily sated? Or had the excessive dissipation of the age made him old before his time? When he says, somewhere in last of the Epistles, that the only way to be happy is to admire nothing, we know what years have done. Cultivation had enervated him. It had weakened zest for life, or he echoed the age that was growing weary with too much living. That is why Christianity overpowered the pagan world. It was worn out with joy. It had lived too much. It was ready for penitence. It was weakened with luxurious learning. There is more love, more understanding of home, in Propertius, Tibullus, than in Horace. Each had had his dream. If Horace had, his words give no hint. He hides from us. Persius says of him: _Sly Horace does not give us his heart to sift_. It may have been his dream was too tenderly cherished to unveil for a greedy world. His emotions, his longings are as carefully concealed as the veiled face of Isis. It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none. He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed, in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit, an air of _de haut en bas_. His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented again until our day, and Verhaeren. Horace set about making life a work of art in the same calm way Goethe did. With both, the thing to be lived was superior to the thing created. He is never confidential. With him, the world is present. He wears a charming manner of indifference. He was too worldly to show his heart. The _human interest_ element is lacking. He would scorn the heart-throbs upon which inquisitive modernity insists. There is a sensuous spirituality in poets of the Augustan Age, in scorn of gold, in clear understanding it can not buy the best, because genuine things belong to all. With them spirituality was striving for the best of earth. There is its sadness, in lack of conception of anything beyond.