poems of the growth of love among them; from the first, Lesbia appears as
the absolute mistress of her lover's heart:

_Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
Rumoresque senum severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda:--_

thus he cries in the first intoxication of his happiness, as yet ignorant
that the brief light of his love was to go out before noon. Clodia soon
showed that the advice not to care for the opinion of the world was, in
her case, infinitely superfluous. That intolerable pride which was the
proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant
disregard of all conventions. In the early days of their love, Catullus
only felt, or only expressed, the beautiful side of this recklessness.
His affection for Clodia had in it, he says, something of the tenderness
of parents for their children; and the poems themselves bear out the
paradox. We do not need to read deeply in Catullus to be assured that
merely animal passion ran as strong in him as it ever did in any man. But
in the earlier poems to Lesbia all this turns to air and fire; the
intensity of his love melts its grosser elements into one white flame.
There is hardly even a word of Lesbia's bodily beauty; her great blazing
eyes have only come down to us in the sarcastic allusions made to them by
Cicero in his speeches and letters. As in a few of the finest lyrics of
Burns, with whom Catullus, as a poet of love, has often been compared,
the ardency of passion has effected for quintessential moments the work
that long ages may work out on the whole fabric of a human soul--
_Concretam exemit labem purumque reliquit aetherium sensum atque aurai