The odes and epodes of Horace - 1893 Author:Horace Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: or, " A hundred flocks thy pastures roam : Large herds, deep uddered, low around thy home At the red close of day : The steed with joyous neigh Welcomes thy f... more »ootstep." —Book II., Ode 16. "Where the huge Pine, and Poplar silver-lined With branches interlaced have made A hospitable shade, And where by curving bank and hollow bay The tremulous waters work their silent way." —Book II., Ode 3. "Yonder Sibyl's temple-home Re-echoing Anio's headlong fall, And Tibur's groves and orchards dewed by rills That dance their glad way down from Tibur's wooded hills." —Book I., Ode. The study of such descriptive passages will reveal the principle upon which Horace worked. He reviewed Nature with an accurate and loving eye, and he described what was most characteristic with brevity, truthfulness, and simplicity. Every epithet is individually appropriate, and is pregnant with half-developed suggestion. There is none of that daubed word-painting which borrows nothing from the imagination, and leaves nothing to it. Horace's Heroic Odes include many passages of descriptive beauty and personal pathos, but are, on the whole, of a widely different class. They are written with the intention ofinfluencing opinion, and effecting some large social or political purpose, or of developing some great principle of moral philosophy. A purpose, often obscure, runs through each. The first duty of the translator, that which he owes to the original author, is to assure himself of the scope of that veiled purpose, and the difficulty of this task may be inferred from the number of learned critics who have been satisfied with commenting upon the Ode piece-meal without any attempt to elucidate its general scope. His second duty, that which he owes to his readers, is to frame his tra...« less