But with affectionate natures like that of Catullus, the memory is not silenced by the barrier which divides the yearning spirit from its kind. The last adieu is a figure of speech which a thousand reminiscences falsify. The forlorn brother tries to solace himself with tender allusions to his bereavement whenever he is sending a missive to some congenial spirit, or inditing epistles of sympathy to a patron in kindred sorrow. What can be sweeter than his lines to Hortalus which accompanied the translation of his Alexandrian model, Callimachus's poem on "Berenice's Hair," to which we shall have to refer again; or his allusion to the same loss in the elegiacs to Manlius, when he undertook the difficult task of consoling with an elegy one whom he gifted erewhile with the most glowing of epithalamia? There is one allusion also to the same topic in the verses to M. Acilius Glabrio, breathing the same acute sense of desolation, and deploring the destiny that ordains their ashes to lie beneath the soils of different continents. It may suffice to cite Theodore Martin's version of the allusion, in the lines to Hortalus, to the brother so soundly sleeping by the Rhætean shore in Trojan earth:—
O brother, dearer far than life, shall I
Behold thee never? But in sooth I will
For ever love thee, as in days gone by;
And ever through my songs shall ring a cry
Sad with thy death—sad as in thickest shade
Of intertangled boughs the melody,
Which by the woful Daulian bird is made,
Sobbing for Itys dead her wail through all the glade."
—(C. lxv.)
