The glimpses of real feeling which the _Epodes_ allow us to gain are as a rule carefully excluded from the _Odes_. This is at first sight a matter for surprise. Our idea of a lyric poem is that of a warm and passionate outpouring of the heart. Such are those of Burns; such are those of nearly all the writers who have gained the heart of modern times. In the grand style of dithyrambic song, indeed, the bard is rapt into an ideal world, and soars far beyond his subjective emotions or desires; but to this Pindaric inspiration Horace made no pretension. He was content to be an imitator of Alcaeus and Sappho, who had attuned to the lyre their own hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows of their own chequered life. But in imitating their form he has altogether changed their spirit. Where they indulged feeling, he has controlled it; what they effect by intensity of colour, he attains by studied propriety of language. He desires not to enlist the world to sympathy with himself, but to put himself in sympathy with the world. Hence the many-sidedness, the culture, the broad human stand-point after which he ceaselessly strives. If depth must be sacrificed to attain this, he is ready to sacrifice it. He finds a field wide enough in the network of aims, interest, and feelings, which give society its hold on us, and us our union with society. And he feels that the writer who shall make his poem speak with a living voice to the largest number of these, will meet with most earnest heed, and be doing best the poet's true work. At the same time we must not forget that Horace's public was not our public. The unwieldy mass of labouring millions, shaken to its depths by questionings of momentous interest, cannot be drawn to listen except by an emotion vast as its own; but the society for whom Horace wrote was homogeneous in tone, limited in number, cultivated in intellect, and deeply absorbed in a race of ambition, some of whose prizes, at least, each might hope to win. He was, has been, and intended himself to be, the poet of men of the world.
Among such men at all times, and to an immeasurably greater extent in antiquity than now, staunch friendship has been considered one of the chief of virtues. Whatever were Horace's relations to the other sex, no man whom he had once called a friend had any cause to complain. Admirable indeed in their frankness, their constancy, their sterling independence, are the friendships it has delighted him to record. From the devoted, almost passionate tribute to Maecenas--