Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/21

effects of habitual profligacy, brought to a premature death the richly-gifted and learned Veronese songster, whom Ovid in his "Amores" bids meet another early-taken bard—Tibullus—his youthful temples ivy-crowned, in the Elysian valley. It is surely with his riper years (perhaps about 61 or 60 B.C.), and not with those when he was more fickle and in the heyday of young blood, that we should connect his passion for Lesbia. Tired, perhaps, of light loves, which left only their bitterness behind, he had dreamed—though it was an empty and ill-founded dream—of a more enduring connection with this most beautiful and graceless of Roman matrons. This idol shattered, its worshipper undeceived, and the brother whom he loved with a pure affection torn from him by an untimely death, Catullus has little more in the way of a landmark for the biographer. Between these events and his death-date, whether we take that as 57 or 54 B.C., there was time for tender regrets, occasional alternations between palinodes and professions of forgiveness, presentiments of coming fate, and more direct facing of premature death. Time also, as to our good fortune he discovered, for collecting the volume of his poems, which he fitly dedicated to Cornelius Nepos, and forwarded to him in a highly-finished dainty copy, "purfled," as one translator expresses it, "glossily, fresh with ashy pumice." It is a happy sample of his ideal of poetic compliment, and apologetically excuses the boldness of offering so slender an equivalent for the historian's three volumes (which have not survived) of Italian history. The first verse illustrates the binding and