Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/43

Rh deceived him, for it must have been after, but not long after, this revival of his transient bliss, that, on the eve of foreign travel with a view to placing the sea between himself and his fickle mistress, he commissioned Furius and Aurelius, friends and comrades for whom he elsewhere shows his regard, to carry her a message of plaintive adieu, which reads like a threnody of buried love:—

The crushed hope, which is likened to the frail flower on the meadow's edge next the furrow (or, as we call it, the "adland"), is one of the most graceful images in the whole of Catullus, and speaks volumes for his freshness of fancy, whilst asserting the depth of his passion. After this, there seems to have remained for the poet little save pathetic retrospects, which he can scarce have hoped would wake remorse. Perhaps it was not the way to quicken this, to plead in formâ pauperis his own deserts and good deeds of happier days, nor yet the fell disease which is wasting him away, in the form of a broken heart. In the 76th poem, such, however, was one of his last references to