Horace is aware of his qualities as a poet. In an interesting blend, of
which the first and larger part is detached and judicial estimation of
his work, a second part literary convention, and the third and least a
smiling and inoffensive self-assertion, he prophesies his own
immortality.

From infancy he has been set apart as the child of the Muses. At birth
Melpomene marked him for her own. The doves of ancient story covered him
over with the green leaves of the Apulian wood as, lost and overcome by
weariness, he lay in peaceful slumber, and kept him safe from creeping
and four-footed things, a babe secure in the favor of heaven. The sacred
charm that rests upon him preserved him in the rout at Philippi, rescued
him from the Sabine wolf, saved him from death by the falling tree and
the waters of shipwreck. He will abide under its shadow wherever he may
go,--to his favorite haunts in Latium, to the far north where fierce
Britons offer up the stranger to their gods, to the far east and the
blazing sands of the Syrian desert, to rude Spain and the streams of
Scythia, to the treeless, naked fields of the frozen pole, to homeless
lands under the fiery car of the too-near sun. He will rise superior to
the envy of men. The pinions that bear him aloft through the clear ether
will be of no usual or flagging sort. For him there shall be no death,
no Stygian wave across which none returns:

F_orego the dirge; let no one raise the cry_,
O_r make unseemly show of grief and gloom_,
N_or think o'er me, who shall not really die_,
T_o rear the empty honor of the tomb_.

His real self will remain among men, ever springing afresh in their
words of praise: