lanugine mala,'—the luxuriant vegetation clothing the rocks and the ideal mountain glades,— Ille latus niveum molli fultus hyacintho, the plants and trees,-osiers and hazels, ilex and beech, -the woods, and meadow-pastures, and rich orchards of his native district, have communicated the soul and secret of their being to the mellow tones of his language and the musical cadences of his verse. He makes us hear again, with a strange delight, the murmur of bees feeding on the willow hedge, the moan of turtle-doves from the high elm tree, the sound of the whispering south wind, of waves breaking on the shore, of rivers flowing down through rocky valleys, the song of the woodman plying his work, the voice of the divine poet chanting his strain. By a few simple words he calls up before our minds the genial luxuriance of spring, the freshness of early morning, the rest of all living things in the burning heat of noon, the stillness of evening, the gentle imperceptible motions of Nature, in the shooting up of the young alder-tree and in the gradual colouring of the grapes on the sunny hill-sides. If the labour of man is mentioned at all, it is in the form of some elegant accomplishment or picturesque task-pruning the vine or grafting the pear-tree, closing the streams that irrigate the pastures, watching the flocks and herds feeding at their own will. The new era on which the world was about to enter is seen by his imagination, like the vision of some pastoral valley, half hidden, half glorified through a golden haze. The peculiar blessings anticipated in that era are the rest from labour, the spontaneous bounty of Nature, the peace that is to reign among the old enemies of the animal kingdom. The human affections which mingle with these representations of Nature are the love of home, and the romantic sentiment, rather than the passion, of love. The common human feeling of the love of home Virgil realises more intensely from his love of the beauty associated with his own home. Many of the sayings of Tityrus and Meliboeus bear witness to the strong hold which their lands and flocks had on men of their class : nos dulcia linquimus arva ergo tua rura manebunt, Et tibi magna satis— Ille meas errare boves ut cernis Spem gregis a, silice in nuda conixa reliquit Ite meae, quondam felix pecus, ite capellae. In the passage of the same Eclogue, from 69-78, En unquam patrios . . . . salices carpetis amaras, Virgil tells, in language of natural pathos and exquisite grace, of the poor man's sorrow in yielding his thatched hut, his well-trimmed fallow-fields, his corn crops, his pear-trees and his vines, the familiar sight of his goats feeding high up among the thickets of the rocks, to some rude soldier, incapable either of enjoying the charm or profiting by the richness of the land. The three poems-the second, eighth, and tenth-of which love is the theme are all of a serious and plaintive) cast. There are few touches in Virgil's art descriptive either of the happier or the lighter and more playful experiences of the passion, which are the common theme of Horace's Odes. Still less does he treat the subject in the style in which Propertius and Ovid celebrate their triumphs. The sentiment of Virgil is more like that of Tibullus; only Virgil gives utterance, though always in a dramatic form, to the real despair of unrequited affection (indigni amoris), while the tone of Tibullus is rather that of one yielding to the luxury of melancholy when in possession of all that his heart desires. They each give expression to that modern mood of passion, in which the heart longs to exchange the familiar life of civilisation for the rougher life of the fields, and to share some humble cottage and the daily occupations of peasant life with the beloved object1. In Virgil also there appears some antici 1 This is the tone of the whole of the first Elegy of Tibullus, e. g. Ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites Rusticus et facili grandia poma manu. Nec tamen interdum pudeat tenuisse bidentes, etc. pation of that longing for lonely communing with Nature in her wilder and more desolate aspects which we associate with romantic rather than with classical poetry. Though, unlike all other Latin poets, Virgil avoids all reference to the realistic side of this passion, there is no ancient poet who has analysed and expressed, with equal truth and beauty and with such a chivalrous devotion, the fluctuations between hope and despair, the sense of personal unworthiness, the sweet memories, the heart-felt longings, the self-forgetful consideration and anxieties of an idealising affection. In such lines as these, expressing at once the sense of unworthiness and the rapid sinking of the heart from hope to despair— Rusticus es Corydon, nec munera curat Alexis, and again— Tanquam haec sint nostri medicina furoris ; in the lines in which Damon traces back his love to its ideal source in early boyhood Saepibus in nostris, etc.; in the fine simile at viii. 85 Talis amor Daphnim, qualis cum fessa iuvencum, etc.; in the tender thought of the dying Gallus for the mistress who had forsaken him— A, tibi ne teneras glacies secet aspera plantas,— there is a delicate and subtle power of touch not unworthy of the master-hand which, with maturer art, delineated the queenly passion and despair of Dido. The supreme excellence of Virgil's art consists in the perfect harmony between his feeling and the medium, through which it is conveyed. The style of his longer poems has many varied excellences, in accordance with the varied character of the thought and sentiment which it is called on to express. But the strong and full volume of diction and rhythm and the complex harmonies of the Georgics would have been an inappropriate vehicle for the luxurious sentiment of the Eclogues. The attitude of the poet's mind in the composition of these earlier poems was that of a genial passiveness rather than that of creative activity. There are few poems of equal excellence in which so little use is made of that force of words which imparts new life to things. A few such expressions might be quoted, like that given by Wordsworth as 'an instance of a slight exertion of the faculty of imagination in the use of a single word ' Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo ; and we notice a similar exertion of the faculty in the line Hic viridis tenera praetexit harundine ripam Mincius. But this actively imaginative use of language seldom occurs in these poems. The general effect of the style is produced by the fulness of feeling, the sweetness or sonorousness of cadence, with which words, used in their familiar sense, are selected and combined. Such epithets as 'mollis,' 'lentus,' 'tener' are of frequent recurrence, yet the impression left by their use is not one of weakness, or of a satiating luxury of sentiment. The soft outlines and delicate bloom of Virgil's youthful style are as true emblems of health as the firmer fibre and richer colouring of his later diction. What an affluence of feeling, what a deep sense of the happiness, of life, of the beauty of the world, of the glory of genius, is conveyed by the simple use of the words fortunatus, formosus, divinus in the lines— Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt Nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus- Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta Ut Linus haec illi divino carmine pastor. The effect he produces by the sound and associations of proper names is like that produced by Milton through the same instrument. Thus, to take one instance out of many, how suggestive of some golden age of pastoral song are the following lines, vague and conventional though their actual application appears to be in the passage where they occur: Non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus, Nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit, Pan etiam Arcadia mecum si iudice certet, Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum. More even in his rhythm than in his diction does Virgil's superiority appear, not only over all the poets of his country, but perhaps over all other poets of past times, except Homer, Milton, and Shakspeare, in those passages in which his dramatic art admits of a richly musical cadence. Our ignorance of the exact pronunciation of Greek in the Alexandrian Age makes a comparison between the effect that would have been produced by the rhythm of Theocritus and the rhythm of the Eclogues in ancient times difficult or impossible. Yet it may be allowed to say this much, that if the rhythm of the Eclogues does not seem to us to attain to the natural and liquid flow of the Greek idyl, yet its tones are. deeper, they seem to come from a stronger and richer source, than any which we can elicit from the Doric reed. Rarely has the soothing and reviving charm of the musical sounds of Nature and of the softer and grander harmonies of poetry been described and reproduced more effectively than in these lines: Hinc tibi, quae semper, vicino ab limite saepes and in these which suggest the thought of that restorative power of genius which a poet of the present day has happily ascribed to Wordsworth1: Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta, Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum 1 Poems by Matthew Arnold. Memorial Verses:- |