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I should never need to try again. There are some lines in the Master that life alone can translate. Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. After a turn or two in silence, Sir James broke off his pacing and came to me. "Sir," he said, "you will know enough to excuse my inattention to a guest. I must make it up if I can. Give me the lantern and wait for us here, Inskip.
He took up the medal he had been examining, and the magnifying glass, in a manner that implied a sort of ostentatious protest to himself that the calm and even tenour of his own life and occupations was not to be disturbed from its course by all the follies and extravagances of the world around him. But "mentem mortalia tangunt!"
It was no doubt written in a tone calculated to affect him deeply, since it induced him to form a resolution, which could only be carried into execution by the tenderest and most generous sympathy for his unhappy friend. Sunt hie etiam sua proemia laudi, Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. E'en the mute walls relate the victim's fame. And sinner's tears the good man's pity claim.
Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. The melancholy Heraclitus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas.
Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy; of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
"Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still." He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war."
He died not long afterwards, and now he lies buried in Allhallows Church, in London, with his tomb turned towards the east, away from the green vale of Clwyd and the mountains of his native Wales; but his book is the great repertory of the literature of his nation, the comparative study of languages and literatures gains every day more followers, and no one of these followers, at home or abroad, touches Welsh literature without paying homage to the Denbighshire peasant's name; if the bard's glory and his own are still matter of moment to him, si quid mentem mortalia tangunt, he may be satisfied.
But the poet, toward whom he had quickly turned, did not hear him. He stood withdrawn into his own thoughts. A shaft of sun, piercing through the ilex trees, laid upon his white toga a sudden sheen of gold, and Maecenas heard him say softly to himself, in a voice whose harmonies he felt he had never wholly gauged before, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
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