Into all subjects he casts a fearless eye, and writes with sustained enthusiasm.  But he was not fully appreciated by his countrymen, although no other poet has so fully brought out the power of the Latin language.  Professor Ramsay, while alluding to the melancholy tenderness of Tibullus, the exquisite ingenuity of Ovid, the inimitable felicity and taste of Horace, the gentleness and splendor of Virgil, and the vehement declamation of Juvenal, thinks that had the verse of Lucretius perished we should never have known that the Latin could give utterance to the grandest conceptions, with all that self-sustained majesty and harmonious swell in which the Grecian muse rolls forth her loftiest outpourings.  The eulogium of Ovid is—­

     “Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
      Exitio terras quum dabit una dies.”

Elegiac poetry has an honorable place in Roman literature.  To this school belongs Ovid, born 43 B.C., died 18 A.D., whose “Tristia,” a doleful description of the evils of exile, were much admired by the Romans.  His most famous work was his “Metamorphoses,” mythologic legends involving transformations,—­a most poetical and imaginative production.  He, with that self-conscious genius common to poets, declares that his poem would be proof against sword, fire, thunder, and time,—­a prediction, says Bayle, which has not yet proved false.  Niebuhr thinks that Ovid next to Catullus was the most poetical of his countrymen.  Milton thinks he might have surpassed Virgil, had he attempted epic poetry.  He was nearest to the romantic school of all the classical authors; and Chaucer, Ariosto, and Spenser owe to him great obligations.  Like Pope, his verses flowed spontaneously.  His “Tristia” were more highly praised than his “Amores” or his “Metamorphoses,” a fact which shows that contemporaries are not always the best judges of real merit.  His poems, great as was their genius, are deficient in the severe taste which marked the Greeks, and are immoral in their tendency.  He had great advantages, but was banished by Augustus for his description of licentious love.  Nor did he support exile with dignity; he languished like Cicero when doomed to a similar fate, and died of a broken heart.  But few intellectual men have ever been able to live at a distance from the scene of their glories, and without the stimulus of high society.  Chrysostom is one of the few exceptions.  Ovid, as an immoral writer, was justly punished.

Tibullus, also a famous elegiac poet, was born the same year as Ovid, and was the friend of the poet Horace.  He lived in retirement, and was both gentle and amiable.  At his beautiful country-seat he soothed his soul with the charms of literature and the simple pleasures of the country.  Niebuhr pronounces the elegies of Tibullus to be doleful, but Merivale thinks that “the tone of tender melancholy in which he sung his unprosperous loves had a deeper and purer source than the caprices of three inconstant paramours....  His spirit is eminently religious, though it bids him fold his hands in resignation rather than open them in hope.  He alone of all the great poets of his day remained undazzled by the glitter of the Caesarian usurpation, and pined away in unavailing despondency while beholding the subjugation of his country.”