And I must further premise that the samples given of quotations from the Classics are from the particular ones he chanced upon--the artist in him, perhaps, instinctively selecting--for the particular youth, and what he needed, or because they fitted on to things on which his mind was working at that date. Here, at all events, they are, or some of them. I omit continual references to Shakespeare, to Dante, to Virgil, to Homer. He was perpetually quoting Homer and Virgil, and to my mind there was nothing for grandeur of sound like his pronunciation of Latin and Greek as he recited whole passages or single lines in illustration of some point, of metre, perhaps, or thought, or feeling; for instance, the line from Homer:
[Greek: bê d' akeôn para thina polyphloisboio thalassês],
commenting on the possibility of pronouncing [Greek: oi] not in our English fashion like _oy_ in _boy_, but like the German _ö_--_o_ of "wood"--_phlösböo_--imitating the lisping whisper of the tideless Mediterranean on a soft summer day. Then how he rolled out his Virgil, giving first the thunder, then the wash of the sea in these lines:
Fluctus ut in medio coepit quum albescere ponto Longius, ex altoque sinum trahit; utque volutus Ad terras immane sonat per saxa, neque ipso Monte minor procumbit; at ima exaestuat unda Verticibus, nigramque alte subiectat arenam.
He used to say, "The Horatian alcaic is, perhaps, the stateliest metre except the Virgilian hexameter at its best."
I take my samples in chance order. I suppose I knew my Catullus fairly well before, but I am sure that, in a deeper sense, I learnt to know "the tenderest of Roman poets" for the first time that day when he read to me in that voice of his, with half-sad _Heiterkeit_, and with that refinement of pronunciation which seemed--I am sure was--the right thing absolutely, those well-known poems about his lady-love's pet sparrow (translated roughly here in case a reader should chance not to know Latin):
Passer, deliciae meae puellae, Quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, Cui primum digitum dare appetenti Et acris solet incitare morsus, Cum desiderio meo nitenti Carum nescio quid libet iocari. Credo ut, cum gravis acquiescet ardor, Tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem Et tristis animi levare curas!