of Mino of Fiesole, with its pale colours and carefully ordered outlines.
Phrases of ordinary prose, which he uses freely, do not, as in Virgil's
hands, turn into poetry by his mere use of them; they give rather than
receive dignity in his verses, and only in a few rare instances, like the
stately _Motum ex Metello consule civicum,_ are they completely fused
into the structure of the poem. So, too, his vivid and clearly-cut
descriptions of nature in single lines and phrases stand out by
themselves like golden tesserae in a mosaic, each distinct in a
glittering atmosphere--_qua tumidus rigat arva Nilus; opacam porticus
excipiebat Arcton; nec prata canis albicant pruinis_--a hundred phrases
like these, all exquisitely turned, and all with the same effect of
detachment, which makes them akin to sculpture, rather than painting or
music. Virgil, as we learn from an interesting fragment of biography,
wrote his first drafts swiftly and copiously, and wrought them down by
long labour into their final structure; with Horace we may rather imagine
that words came to the surface slowly and one by one, and that the _Odes_
grew like the deposit, cell by cell, of the honeycomb to which, in a
later poem, he compares his own work. In some passages where the _Odes_
flag, it seems as though material had failed him before the poem was
finished, and he had filled in the gaps, not as he wished, but as he
could, yet always with the same deliberate gravity of workmanship.

_Horatii curiosa felicitas_--this, one of the earliest criticisms made on
the _Odes,_ remains the phrase which most completely describes their
value. Such minute elaboration, on so narrow a range of subject, and
within such confined limits of thought and feeling, could only be
redeemed from dulness by the perpetual felicity--something between luck
and skill--that was Horace's secret. How far it was happy chance, how far
deliberately aimed at and attained, is a question which brings us before
one of the insoluble problems of art; we may remind ourselves that, in