and the happy men, men like Valerius, go unreluctantly, like well-fed guests from a banquet, to enter upon untroubled rest.  Nor is his death outside of law.  From all eternity life and death have been at war with each other.  No day and no night passes when the first cry of a child tossed up on the shores of light is not mingled with the wailings of mourners.  Let me tell you how you may transmute your sorrow.  A battle rages in the plain.  The earth is shaken with the violent charges of the cavalry and with the tramping feet of men.  Cruel weapons gleam in the sun.  But to one afar off upon a hill the army is but a bright spot in the valley, adding beauty, it may well be, to a sombre scene.  And so, ascending into the serene citadel of Knowledge and looking down upon our noisy griefs, we may find them to be but high lights, ennobling life’s monotonous plain.  My friend, come to Nature and learn of her.  Surely Valerius would have wished you peace.”

“Peace, peace!” Catullus groaned aloud.  Lucretius seemed as remote as the indifferent gods.  Valerius, who knew his feet were shaped for human ways, would have understood that he could not scale the cold steeps of thought.  If he suffered in this hour, what comfort was there in the thought of other suffering and other years?  If Troy now held Valerius, what peace was there in knowing that its accursed earth once covered Hector and Patroclus also, and would be forever the common grave of Asia and of Europe?  What healing had nature or law to give when flesh was torn from flesh and heart estranged from heart beyond recall?

Rising, Catullus looked down upon the unresting river.  As he walked homeward, clear-eyed, at last, but unassuaged, he knew that for him also there could never again be peaceful currents.  Like the Adige, his tumultuous grief, having its source in the pure springs of childish love, must surge through the years of his manhood, until at last it might lose itself in the vast sea of his own annihilation.

II

In the capital a dull winter was being prophesied.  Only one gleam was discoverable in the social twilight.  The Progressives had shipped Cato off to Cyprus and society was rid for one season of a man with a tongue, who believed in economy when money was plentiful, in sobriety when pleasure was multiform and in domestic fidelities when escape was easy.  But they had done irreparable mischief in disposing more summarily of Cicero.  With the Conservative leader exiled to Greece and the Progressive leader himself taking the eagles into Gaul the winter’s brilliance was threatened with eclipse.  Pompey was left in Rome, but the waning of his political star, it could not be denied, had dimmed his social lustre.  Clodius, of course, was in full swing, triumphant in Caesar’s friendship and Cicero’s defeat, but if society was able to stomach him, he himself had the audacious honesty to foregather in grosser companionship.  Even Lucullus, whose food and wine had come to seem a permanent refuge amid political changes and social shifts, must now be counted out.  His mind was failing, and the beautiful Apollo dining room and terraced gardens would probably never be opened again.