Certainly, as he grew older and his physical energy diminished (he had not been really well since he was a very young man, and now before his time he felt old), he appreciated more and more his good fortune in owning a corner of the earth so situated.  He remembered with amusement that in earlier days he sometimes used to feel bored by the solitude of his farm, at the end of his journey from Rome, and wonder why he had left the lively city.  But that was when he was young enough to enjoy the bustle of the streets, and, especially in the evenings, to join the crowds of pleasure-seekers and watch the fortune-tellers and their victims.  That he could mingle inconspicuously with the populace he had always counted one of the chief rewards of an inconspicuous income.  Now, the quiet of the country and the leisure for reading seemed so much more important.  He was not even as anxious as he used to be to go to fashionable Tibur or Tarentum or Baiae in search of refreshment.  How pleased Virgil would have been with his rustic content!

The sudden thought brought a smile to his eyes and then a shadow.  Virgil had been dead more than ten years, but his loss seemed all at once a freshly grievous thing.  So much that was valuable in his life was inextricably associated with him.  Horace’s mind, usually sanely absorbed in present interests, began, because of a trick of memory, to turn more and more toward the past.  Virgil had been one of the first to help him out of the bitterness that made him a rather gloomy young man when the Republic was defeated, and his own little property dissipated, and had introduced him to Maecenas, the source of all his material prosperity and of much of his happiness.  And indeed he had justified Virgil’s faith, Horace said to himself with a certain pride.  He had begun as the obscure son of a freedman, and here he was now, after fifty, one of the most successful poets of Rome, a friend of Augustus, a person of importance in important circles, and withal a contented man.

This last achievement he knew to be the most difficult, as it was the most unusual.  And there in the clarifying sunshine he said to himself that the rich treasure of his content had been bought by noble coin:  by his temperance and good sense in a luxurious society, by his self-respecting independence in a circle of rich patrons, and perhaps, above all, by his austerely honest work among many temptations to debase the gift the Muses had bestowed upon him.  He had had no Stoic contempt for the outward things of this world.  Indeed, after he had frankly accepted the Empire he came to feel a pride in the glory of Augustus’s reign, as he felt a deep, reconciling satisfaction in its peace, its efforts at restoring public morals, its genuine insistence on a renewed purity of national life.  The outward tokens of increasing wealth charmed his eyes, and he took the keenest pleasure in the gorgeous marble pillars and porticoes of many of the houses he frequented, in the beautiful statues,