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The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten, probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the fallentis semita vitae. This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.
*Transliterated from Greek. A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitae', was not to be yours. Fate otherwise decreed it.
He had no popular aptitudes, and was very suspicious of them. He had no care for the possession of influence; he had deliberately chosen the fallentis semita vitae, and to be what his father had been, a faithful and contented country parson, was all that he desired. But idleness was not in his nature.
For such work I was both equipped and prepared, and I turned back to the fallentis semita vitae, which is the true path for the sincere spirit, aware that I had been truly and tenderly saved from committing a grave mistake. Perhaps if one could have looked at the whole question in a simpler and larger-minded way, the result might have been different.
His muse has followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis semita vitae, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will find her all the fresher for her country ways. My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence.
Good sense, good feeling, good taste, these qualities, latent from the first in Horace, have obtained a final mastery over the coarser strain with which they had at first been mingled; and in their shadow now appear glimpses of an inner nature even more rare, from which only now and then he lifts the veil with a sort of delicate self-depreciation, in an occasional line of sonorous rhythm, or in some light touch by which he gives a glimpse into a more magical view of life and nature: the earliest swallow of spring on the coast, the mellow autumn sunshine on a Sabine coppice, the everlasting sound of a talking brook; or, again, the unforgettable phrases, the fallentis semita vitae, or quod petis hic est, or ire tamen restat, that have, to so many minds in so many ages, been key-words to the whole of life.
The fallentis semita vitae, that path of noiseless life, which eludes and deceives the conscious notice both of its subject and of all around him, opens equally to the man and to the child; and the happiest of all childhoods will have been that of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power.
"A Scotch surgeon may have more learning than an English one, and all Scotland could not muster learning enough for Lowth's Prelections." See ante, ii. 363, and March 30, 1783. The poem is entitled Gualterus Danistonus ad Amicos. It begins: 'Dum studeo fungi fallentis munere vitae' Which Prior imitates: 'Studious the busy moments to deceive.
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