of pleasure, to which is often added another charm in the ethereal beauty of the multitudinous canopy of clouds that gather in ever-changing shapes above the mountains and cast their shadows of darkest blue over valley and lake and sharp-cut crest. Under the soft azure of the Italian sky and amidst the brilliance of Italian sunshine, the landscape is one to which there are few rivals in any part of the globe.

That the absorbing beauty of the scenery was one of the chief attractions of the place to Catullus may surely be assumed. It could not but appeal powerfully to a mind so sensitive as his was to all that was bright and beautiful in the world around him. This appeal would be enforced by the consciousness that all this transcendent loveliness lay in his own native province, not far from his birthplace, if not also dear to him from the recollection of holidays spent here in his boyhood.

But there was a feature of Sirmio which, we cannot but think, played a notable part among the charms which the place had in the eyes of Catullus. No one can attentively read his poems without observing the remarkable contrast between the tone of his allusions to the sea and seafaring and those of other Roman poets to the same subject. Whereas Horace, for example, seems to exhaust his native tongue in seeking terms of abuse to express his antipathy and disgust, Catullus utters no word of disparagement, but, on the contrary, delights to paint the beauty and grandeur of the deep, and to dwell on the pleasure he had enjoyed in sailing over its surface. His longest poem, the 'Peleus and Thetis,' is full of the spirit of the sea in all its moods of calm and storm. As the epithalamium of a sea-goddess, such a poem would naturally include references to the sea; but the poet displays such an exuberance of allusion and so great a variety of picturesque epithets as to indicate how much he was at home among the 'clear waves,' the 'salt depths,' the 'blue expanse of the sea,' the 'windy main,' the 'foaming surge,' and the 'wave lashed into white froth by the oars.'* Indeed, it would seem as if

lxiv, 1-18. 'Liquidas undas,' 'Phasidos fluctus,' 'vada salsa,' 'cærula æquora,' 'ventosum æquor,' 'tortaque remigio spumis incanduit unda,' 'freti candenti e gurgite,' 'e gurgite cano.' All these phrases and epithets are crowded into the first eighteen lines of the poem, as if Catullus Vol. 222.-No. 442.

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he found the Latin language inadequate to convey his vivid impression of the grandeur of the sea in a storm, for he coins a new word to express the continuous torrent-like roar of the waves along an exposed line of coast (fluentisono litore, lxiv, 52). Again, the sonnet on the yacht which carried him back from the East could only have been written by one who had the instincts and experience of a yachtsman, and who loved his vessel as a personal friend that had braved with him all the perils of the deep. From many other of his poems similar evidence might be given of his keen appreciation of the sea.

Now the position of Sirmio-an islet, like a ship at anchor, in the midst of the largest expanse of fresh water in Cisalpine Gaul-could not but appeal to the imagination of a poet who was also a yachtsman. One is tempted to believe that it may have been by boating and sailing on this lake in his boyhood that Catullus imbibed his taste for seamanship. At his other homes in Rome, Tivoli or Verona he had no opportunity of being afloat; and one of the sources of his eagerness to get back to Sirmio probably lay in the opportunities which the place gave him of indulging in a favourite pastime. There was no such tempting field for inland aquatic sport to be had anywhere else in the country. We can hardly believe that he undertook the trouble and expense of having his trusty yacht piloted from the Adriatic Sea up into the Lacus Benacus, merely to have the gratification of dedicating it as an offering to the Dioscuri. It seems much more probable that the transportation was carried out in order that he might have the satisfaction of cruising on Benacus in his beloved eastern phasellus, with sails or oars as the weather might permit. It is clear that a considerable interval of time elapsed between the return of the vessel and the occasion when the poet described her achievements to his friends and pointed to her hulk quietly moored by the shores of the lake. The final laying-up of the yacht and her

was so full of delight in the deep, and so carried away by the prospect of writing a sea-story, that he could not restrain the exuberance of his language.

* The voyage is there referred to as an old story-hæc prius fuere › (iv, 25).

dedication to the sailors' divinities may not have taken place until the time came when she was considered no longer seaworthy. Moreover, we can imagine that when the poet had provided in a grateful spirit that his phasellus should spend a quiet and honoured old age near his home at Sirmio, he would not fail to put in her place another craft of some sort; for the spirit of the yachtsman would impel him, as long as the state of his funds would permit, to maintain the means of being afloat and moving over the surface of his 'limpid lake.'

From the way in which the southern end of the Lago di Garda extends well out of the Alpine chain, and from the position of Sirmione off the shore, the horizon visible from this place is remarkably extensive and distant in every direction save towards the north. The blue rim where skies and mountains meet' is so unobstructed and lies so far away that the sunrises and sunsets must be exceptionally well seen. We know that these times of the day were dear to Catullus, and we may believe that their glory as seen from his home here would be to him not the least of the pleasures of the place. From his 'fast-anchored isle' he would see the sun rise from behind the far-off slopes of the southern Alps north of Verona. When early astir on the lake, he might look on such a scene as he has vividly depicted in the 'Peleus and Thetis,' 'when the dawn mounts upward to the threshold of the wandering sun, and the morning breath of the west wind, ruffling the calm sea, urges forward the sloping waves which at first move slowly before the mild breeze, with a sound as of gentle laughter; but as the wind freshens, they wax ever more and more, and floating far away, flash back the crimson light.'* evening, from the crest of his isle he could see the sun sink beneath the distant hills above Brescia, and the Alpine peaks, one after another, lighted up with the gleam of the after-glow. The regular succession from dawn to dusk, so impressively visible from Sirmio, would now and then, for a moment, suggest a solemn thought to the poet, as in the sad but exquisitely musical verses:

'Soles occidere et redire possunt :

Nobis, quum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.' †

At

But the Lago di Garda does not always wear a placid smile; and Catullus, who had sailed through so many furious seas, without ever appealing for protection to the gods of the adjacent shores,* could not fail to take pleasure in watching its surface in a storm. From a firm foothold at the top of the cliff in which the island ends towards the north-a cliff which may have been the boundary of his garden-he could look across the whole expanse of this 'ventosum æquor.' Nowhere else could he behold such uproar in fresh water. It would remind him of the 'truculenta pelagi' on the Egean or the Adriatic Sea. As he looked northwards, the distant mountains and the upper part of the lake would probably be shrouded in grey mist out of which he would see the white-crested waves march towards him in rapid succession until they burst in all their fury against the limestone cliff below. If he retreated from this tumult to the sheltered lee-side of his isle, he could hear, three miles away, the loud roar of the breakers along the southern shore-a sound which, as he heard it among the eastern seas, he has expressed in words that seem to bring the scene vividly to both eye and ear:

'Litus ut longe resonante Eoa
Tunditur unda ' (xi, 3).

The visitor who knows the lake only in all the loveliness of its tranquil summer beauty, smooth as glass or only gently rippled into 'Lydian laughter,' may find a difficulty in picturing to himself what it is at the height of a great gale from the north. But should he have any geological experience, he will find at the northern end of Sirmione impressive proof of what has been achieved by the storms of many successive centuries in battering down the solid limestone rock. Precisely as happens on a bold coast exposed to the gales of an open sea, the original sloping declivity of the islet has been cut back into a vertical cliff, with a flat platform of rock at its base. When the water is low this platform may be traversed dryshod; but, when the level of the lake is high and a strong northerly gale is blowing, the waves

* iv, 18-23. Horace, on the other hand, regarded such supplication as the normal practice of seafarers-‘Otium divos rogat in patenti prensus Ægo.'-'Carm.' II, xvi,,i.

sweep against the face of the cliff, which they slowly undermine. Since the glacier retired and water took the place of ice in the basin of the lake, a huge notch has thus been excavated out of the northern front of Sirmione by the bombardment of the waves. There would seem to have been an appreciable amount of loss during the last 1900 years, for some of the masonry, connected with the so-called villa of Catullus, is now at the verge of the precipice. There are probably few other places in Europe where the abrasive energy of waves generated in a freshwater lake is so strongly demonstrated.

In the neighbourhood of lofty mountains the atmospheric changes are marked by a wider range and take place with greater rapidity than is the case in lowland regions. Summer and winter are more sharply marked off from each other. Storms are more frequent; rains are heavier; and any serious fall of temperature is indicated by the appearance of fresh snow on at least the higher peaks and crests. Even in the course of a single day the changes of sky may be many, and may quickly succeed each other. The look of the landscape alters continually under these transformations of the heavens above; and thus a fresh source of beauty and charm is given to scenery that is in itself already full of attraction. The peculiar position of Sirmione is eminently favourable for watching these movements of clouds and winds, and their effects on the aspect of the mountains on the one hand and the rolling lowland on the other. Moreover, to what can be seen on land there is here added a wide expanse of water, which even more sensitively reacts to atmospheric perturbations. To a poetic eye like that of Catullus, the contemplation of these constant and almost kaleidoscopic variations in the tones and colours of the landscape, synchronous and sympathetic with the changes in the face of the sky, would be, even if unconsciously, another of the fascinations of his Sirmio.

The swiftness with which the atmospheric changes may succeed each other in that region of mountain and plain was vividly brought home to the writer in the course of a boating excursion on the southern portion of the Lago di Garda one mild day in April. There had been a slight snowfall on the loftier heights during the