Languida desertis Gnosia litoribus,
Qualis et accubuit primo Cepheia somno
Libera iam duris cotibus Andromede,_

Even when one comes to them fresh from Virgil, lines like these open a
new world of sound. The Greek elegiac, as it is known to us by the finest
work of the epigrammatists, had an almost unequalled flexibility and
elasticity of rhythm; this quality Propertius from the first seized, and
all but made his own. By what course of reasoning he was led in his later
work to suppress this large and elastic treatment, and approximate more
and more closely to the fine but somewhat limited and metallic rhythm
which has been perpetuated by the usage of Ovid, we cannot guess. In this
first book he ends the pentameter freely with words of three, four, and
five syllables; the monotony of the perpetual disyllabic termination,
which afterwards became the normal usage, is hardly compensated by the
increased smoothness which it gives the verse.

But this new power of versification accompanied a new spirit even more
remarkable, which is of profound import as the precursor of a whole
school of modern European poetry. The _Cynthia_ is the first appearance
in literature of the neurotic young man, who reappeared last century in
Rousseau's _Confessions_ and Goethe's _Werther,_ and who has dominated
French literature so largely since Alfred de Musset. The way had been
shown half a century before by that remarkable poet, Meleager of Gadara,
whom Propertius had obviously studied with keen appreciation. Phrases in
the _Cynthia_, like--

_Tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus
Et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus,_