CATULLUS.
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darker shades than ever before ; and as our standard of right and justice advances. the contrast becomes more and more striking.
Yet, assured by the strength of our foundation, aided by the united energy of clergy college and court, and intent upon the realization of our ideal form of government, we are confident of the results, and believe that the essence of true character will again be verified in the person of the true man.
M.
CATULLUS.
There never was a poet—we do not even except Shakspeare—who seemed to write more as the mood happened to prompt, and whose verses are stamped with such a decided character of facility and of spontaneity as Catullus. This, indeed, is the great, and among the Latin poets, his peculiar charm. Of all the Romans, he is most of a Greek, not by study and imitation, but by nature. His lively wit, his voluptuous character, his hearty affections, his powerful imagination, seem naturally to overflow in verse and "voluntary wake harmonious numbers."
His amatory poetry is less tender than that of Tibullus, and less gay and gallant than that of Ovid; but it is more simple, more cordial, more voluptuous than either. The passion of Catullus had not a particle of Platonic abstraction in it—it was as far as possible from being metaphysical. It is deeply tinged with sensuality, but it has absolute possession of his whole being; he seems to be smitten to the bottom of his heart with its power—to be quite intoxicated with its delicious raptures. It is that "drunkenness of soul," of which Byron speaks, from an imagination excited and exalted by visions of bliss and images of beauty—with every feeling absorbed in one devoted passion, and all the senses dissolved in a dream of love.
But the noblest specimen, beyond comparison, of poetry and pathos which the works of Catullus present—the most powerful appeal to the sympathies of the human bosom as the liveliest picture of its hidden workings and intensest agonies, is
that Galliambic ode known as the Atys. The subject is a very affecting one. Under the influence of a frenzied enthusiasm, a young man forsakes his home and his country, for the purpose of dedicating himself to the service of the Idaean Goddess. The vow of chastity which a monk may break, was rendered inviolable to the Gallae—for so the priests of Cybele were called—by the same means which, in later times, a father of the church adopted to disarm the temptations of the flesh. Atys, in the frenzy of his first excitement, is regularly initiated. He rushes madly forth to mingle in the revelry of the Gallae, whom he arouses by the trump and the timbrel, and wildly exhorts to follow him to the lofty groves of the goddess. Their frantic demeanor, their Bacchanalian dances, their shrill and piercing howls are painted with a force of coloring which nothing can surpass. The imitative harmony of the versification is perfect—it is abrupt, irregular, disordered. You hear in it the hurried step, the clashing cymbal, the resounding timbrel. To all this comotion and disorder, a moment of repose—of soft but fatal repose—succeeds. The Maenades, exhausted by their furious excitement, sink down at the threshold of the temple to sleep. A beautiful morning rises upon them, and Atys wakes—to despair. His lament is affecting beyond the power of language to describe. It seems wrung from a broken heart and is fraught with all its agony and desolation. All the poetry of all ages may be safely challenged to produce any thing more painfully interesting and pathetic. H. S. L.