44. The great majority of his verses -- all the most successful of them -- are the direct expression of his own heart at the moment. No poet was ever more unreserved, more perfectly ingenuous. And yet, such is the facility of his genius and the excellence of his taste, his verses show no ruggedness or roughness, but glide along with the utmost ease and swift grace toward their mark. But he was no precisianist in metrics. His hexameters are less perfect and flexible than those of P. Varro or of Lucretius, his elegiacs less harmonious and melting than those of the Augustans, his logaoedics often less melodious than those of Horace. And nevertheless his rhythmical skill suggests constantly that it is the effect of great artfulness.
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Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
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