I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes of
the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature of the
lighter verse than this of Alcman's--[Greek text]. Do you remember the
pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"?

"Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire,
Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire,
Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing,
Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring."

It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for his
limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the honey-
voiced girls.

The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society
Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a _boudoir_ decorum is, or ought
always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into passion, and
where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment." Honest women
were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.

The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannot expect the genius of
Catullus not to "surge into passion," even in his hours of gayer song,
composed when

_Multum lusimus in meis tabellis_,
_Ut convenerat esse delicatos_,
_Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum_.

Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, are