may only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a single
individual. The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly less
needful than the poet's inspiration.

Such were the variety and abundance of Horace's experience. It was large
and human. He had touched life high and low, bond and free, public and
private, military and civil, provincial and urban, Hellenic, Asiatic,
and Italian, urban and rustic, ideal and practical, at the cultured
court and among the ignorant, but not always unwise, common people.

And yet, numbers of men possessed of experience as abundant have died
without being poets, or even wise men. Their experience was held in
solution, so to speak, and failed to precipitate. Horace's experience
did precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by reason
of which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his associates
among the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies could include
the freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier. Unlike most of the
multitude from which he sprang, he could extend his sympathies to the
careworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had learned from his own
lot and from observation that no life was wholly happy, that the cares
of the so-called fortunate were only different from, not less real than,
those of the ordinary man, that every human heart had its chamber
furnished for the entertainment of Black Care, and that the chamber was
never without its guest.

But not even the precipitate of experience called wisdom will alone make
the poet. Horace was again endowed by nature with another and rarer and
equally necessary gift,--the sense of artistic expression. It would be
waste of time to debate how much he owed to native genius, how much to
his own laborious patience, and how much to the good fortune of generous