Musa dedit fidibus Divos, puerosque Deorum, Et pugilem victorem, et equum certamine primnm, Et juvenum curas, et libera vina referre.--Hor. De Arte Poet.
The Muse to nobler subjects tunes her lyre; Gods, and the sons of Gods, her song inspire; Wrestler and steed, who gained the Olympic prize, Love’s pleasing cares, and wine’s unbounded joys.--Francis.
Misenum Aeoliden, quo non praestantior alter Aere ciere viros, Martemque accendere cnatu. [275] Virgil, Aeneid, vi. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sed tum forte cava dum personat aequora concha Demens, et canto vocat in certamina Divos.--Ibid.
Misenus, son of Oeolus, renowned The warrior trumpet in the field to sound; With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms, And rouse to dare their fate in honourable arms.
(175) Swollen with applause, and aiming still at more, He now provokes the sea-gods from the shore.--Dryden
There arose in this department, among the Greeks, nine eminent poets, viz. Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibicus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, and Pindar. The greater number of this distinguished class are now known only by name. They seem all to have differed from one another, no less in the kind of measure which they chiefly or solely employed, than in the strength or softness, the beauty or grandeur, the animated rapidity or the graceful ease of their various compositions. Of the amorous effusions of the lyre, we yet have examples in the odes of Anacreon, and the incomparable ode of Sappho: the lyric strains which animated to battle, have sunk into oblivion; but the victors in the public games of Greece have their fame perpetuated in the admirable productions of Pindar.
Horace, by adopting, in the multiplicity of his subjects, almost all the various measures of the different Greek poets, and frequently combining different measures in the same composition, has compensated for the dialects of that tongue, so happily suited to poetry, and given to a language less distinguished for soft inflexions, all the tender and delicate modulations of the Eastern song. While he moves in the measures of the Greeks with an ease and gracefulness which rivals their own acknowledged excellence, he has enriched the fund of lyric harmony with a stanza peculiar to himself. In the artificial construction of the Ode, he may justly be regarded as the first of lyric poets. In beautiful imagery, he is inferior to none: in variety of sentiment and felicity of expression, superior to every existing competitor in Greek or Roman poetry. He is elegant without affectation; and what is more remarkable, in the midst of gaiety he is moral. We seldom meet in his Odes with the abrupt apostrophes of passionate excursion; but his transitions are conducted with ease, and every subject introduced with propriety.