And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked
through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he
would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a
passionate cry:

_O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow?
When shall I cease to be silent?... May he love to-morrow, he
has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again
to-morrow._

Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this
springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son
of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the
musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the
book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And
what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic
and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phaedra, formed and re-formed continually
in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's
age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines
are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into
outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for
Augustin, this was the world he was born into--it was his pagan Africa
where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of
the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses--they were not dead, those
ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at
Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus
of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love
comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly
discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The
unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and