VOL. XXIX. NOTRE DAME, INDIANA, MAY 2, 1896. No. 30. Longings. Solvitur Acris Hiems. FOR a land where 'tis sunset always! AUSTIN O AIALLEY. @ And 0 for a dwelling with beam-kissed hall-ways, And turrets sparkling, (Horace, Car. I., 4.) And nothing darkling! DOUBT that passed sunshine Not even a crypt Should be left undipped and dead friends return. One In the softened glow and the loveliness nowadays hears a solitary'" 'Of a lamp majestic in weariness. bluebird fluting before April's coming feet, but I do not find O for a never-bedimmed blue sky, the whole of Spring in a tuft And out- in the west to glorify of grass as in the old time. With streaks unnumbered There are more . shadows in Of golden-cumbered your modern gray day. than Beams of the sun, there were in those green-golden mornings. When day is done, I watched a swallow drift out of the south A few stray clouds of fantastic mien last week, but he was merely a bird. Yet there To fringe the blue and to cap the green! was a time when tliat blue-black twittering There where the lengthening shadows fall mystery had three drops of the devil's blood in Meet 'tis to live and to die withal; his tiiiy body! I do not believe this story today No dazzling glare, and I am sorry for my unbelief. Why cannot No dimness there; there be creepy skeletons in the hirundean A never-ceasing. closet in 1896? Those swallows—-there was a Never-increasing river which God led down through Pennsylva- Light entangled by magic ties ' . nian hills and He thronged every curve thereof With darkness come from the silent skies. with a hundred forms of beauty. In old Spring - . J-B. ; evenings the skimming swallows would; dip through the slanting.sun-rays into the crimson " FOOL! the ideal is in thyself,the impediment water and set the rings of ripples atremble,and too is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff eager bass would leap in narrow gleams of thou art to shape thatsame ideal out of. What silver lieht for venturesome moths, and fall matters whether such stuff be of this sort.or. back tinkling into the limpid deeps. The wooded that, so the form: thou give it be heroic, be hills, blue as a gentian, held up the pines in faint poetic? O thou, that pinest in the; imprisonmen: black lines against the glory of the^ twilight of the actual, and criest bitterly tothe gods for until-the riverrflames smouldered to-gray and a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this one star burned...' ;, ; * ^ ,. - of a truth. The thing.thou seekest is already with ': Ite domuiii satnrm\ vcmt:'Hespenis,ite capellts,-^ thee,' here or novvhere,' cbuldst thoii only'see.'-. and we weint;; with shoes hung on shoulders,- 490 NOTRE DAME SCHOLASTIC. and bare feet twinkling in the long lush grass. Spring had come up from Africa, and Horace Sureh^, old Spring da3'^s were better; even the stood upon the steps ot the Temple of Vesta. old Spring songs were better. They do -not The vast plain of the Campagna went down at write Spring songs in these chill days. I do. his right hand to imperial Rome dim in floods not find music like this,in the new books: of light, and it stretched out beyond the city Summer is icomen in to the Mediterranean and onward to the south­ Lhude sing, cuccu; ern sky-line. Groweth sed, and bloweth med. The steady gliding of the Anio over the cliff And springeth tlie Wde nu, gave him the melody for the opening words: Sing, cuccu! "Solvitur acris hiems." Then came Favonius Awe bleteth after lomb, out of the west and he made the j'^oung olive Lhouth after calve cu; Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth, leaves flare from dark green to white, and he Murie sing, cuccu. lifted the spray of the cascade along the face Cuccu! Cuccu! of the precipice. That quick swaying is in the Wei singes thu, cuccu, words, " Grata vice veris." Straightway the Fall Ne swik thu naver nu. settled back into the deep even tone—"et Sing, cuccu, nu. Fa von i." Sing, cuccu! He turned his head and gazed upon the Cam­ Then there is that old siDring-song b)'^ Horace, pagna. The white line of the uplifted sea was " Solvitur Acris Hiems," the fourth lyric in his faint in the distance. He thought of Ostia, where first book of "odes." 1 feel assured that Horace the war-galleys wore out and in with wet oars wrote this poem at Tivoli. glittering in the 3''oung sun, and the sails of the Ego, apis Matina; fishermen glinted and gloomed in the steady More modoque. wind. Grata carpentis thyma per laborem Trahuntque siccas machinse carinas. Plurimum, circa nemus uvidique Tiburis ripas, operosa parvus Back over the level meadows his fancy Carmina fingo. wanders— Ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni. It was written in February also, no matter Nee prata canis albicant pruinis. what the commentators say to the contrary. I, The young grape leaves are gray and edged at one time, had a learned argument, drawn from with carmine, and beads of quivering dew tip a consideration of the " Faunalia," to prove this the million spears of the grass with sapphire statement, but alack! that has grown misty. and topaz and amethyst. The round hills are Favonius begins to blow in February; there is oversmoked with a thin haze of olive-leaves, and an argiimentative fact of which I am certain! the villas are misty-green with breaking buds. Back at the Sabine farm, above the torrent He looks down at the tumbling snow of . Digentia, waters. Foam—Aphrodite that sprang from the In long continuous lines the.mountains run, . foam: Cleft by a valley, which twice feels the sun— lam cythere a chores ducit Venus imminente luna Once on the right, when first he lifts his beams, lunctseque nymphis Gratiae decentes Once on the left, when he descends in streams. Alterno terram quatiunt pede, dum gravis Cyclopum This Horace tells us in the sixteenth epistle. Volcanus ardens visit officinas. It was too chill out there during the wintry He would make the Love-Queen have more months, and the poet went into Tivoli. Spring of the mystic spirit of spring under the twilight, comes back to centra:! Itaty in February. The therefore he sets the crescent of Dian shimmer­ Anio tumbles and rushes down the ravines and ing on a sky which is soft and deep as the under .the bare wild mountains, literally tunnel­ petals of a black pansy, even as a great pearl ing the'crags in rriany places, until it sweeps glinimers at evening upon my Lady's dark out where Tivoli basks along a lofty ridge, and tresses: The Graces and wood-nymphs eddy there the breaking waters fling themselves in about her in dim white gyres, while Vulcan : two lojig leaps, once as an avalanche of show swings his clanging hammer in the murky, Cyclo­ down the face of a precipice, once through the pean stithy. The husband toils, the wife dances, deep black cave of Neptune, thien- they sing^ whereas she should have, been at home rocking quietly among the olive orchards and vineyards, Dan Cupid to sleep." : . iand \vander: silently seaward. Perched above But the sunshine is too insistent to let him :the upper cascade is-tlie little :Temple of Vesta dream of twilight. .Favonius had turned the as delicately beautiful as frost-ferns. ." - sward to violets.^^:^-:,;.: -ii., '•" 1 ^•--Jr NOTRE DAME SCHOLASTIC, 491 The cone-beaked hyacinth returns any brutal ignorance which I may display in To light his bhie-flamed chandelier. referring to their sacred mysteries of the toilet, The cyclamen, term qjiem. ferunt sobttce, peeps had better "run" also. My subscription tO; up throughout that blessed Italian land, and "Vogue" and Browning, King & Company's troops innumerous of those " flowers white "Mirror of Fashion" ran out some months and rede, such that men callen daisies in oure since, and, alas! I am "dead broke.") toun," star the pleasant fields. But to continue, all manner of high thoughts Nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto, and noble aspirations as well as emotions of the Aut flore, terne quern ferunt soiuta;; heart may be displayed to the elect, attached Nunc et in umbrosis Fauno decet immolare lucis. Sen poscat agna sive malit hasdo. to an " E. & W."—if the operator is skilful and experienced. And Horace looks down at the blooms that he And to come back to the grosser facts of will cull to deck his temples. life; how wonderfully can a Napoleon of neck- How sweetly borne tiedom further his desires in every direction. On wings of morning o'er the leafless thorn The tiny wren's small twitter warbles near. The heart of many a budding maiden has pal­ But suddenly pale Death stumbles along pitated with a strange, new-born delight when the verses. What strange, rattling alliteration her eyes rested upon the collar-bone region of some sweet young man. She thrills with the Horace uses there: new sensation, and fondly believes that Love, Pallida Mors a;quo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regnumque turres. the all-powerful, has clutched, her in his sweet I could never explain that veer in his imagin­ embrace. She does not know that it is really ing. There is not enough meaning in the word the mesmeric influence exerted upon her artis­ ini7nolarc of the preceding stanza to call up tic sense by a vivid green or yellow tie.