engaged in gathering together some heap of corn for their winter's store— It nigrum campis agmen, etc. Others again are suggested by his subtle and sympathetic discernment of the conditions of inward feeling; as the comparison at iv. 70, etc. of Dido to the hind, which, unsuspecting of danger, has received a mortal wound from a hand ignorant of the harm which it has inflicted haeret lateri letalis harundo. The awe and mystery of the unseen world suggests the comparison of the crowd of shades pressing round Charon's boat to innumerable leaves falling in the woods, or to flocks of birds driven across the sea by the first cold of autumn Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto The point of comparison in this simile is not merely the obvious one of the number of leaves falling or birds flying across the sea in autumn, but rather the inner likeness between the passive helplessness with which the leaves have yielded to the chill touch of the year, and that with which the shades-νεκύων ἀμένηνα κάρηνα—have yielded to the chill touch of death. Nor perhaps is it pressing the language of Virgil too far to suppose that in the words 'terris inmittit apricis' he means to leave on the mind a feeling of some happier possibilities in death than the certainty of 'cold obstruction's apathy.' One of the most characteristically Virgilian similes—that at vi. 453–— qualem primo qui surgere mense Aut videt, aut vidisse putat per nubila Lunam— is almost a translation of the lines of Apollonius (iv. 1447)— τὰς ἰδέειν, ὡς τίς τε νέῳ ἐνι ἤματι μήνην ἢ ἴδεν, ἢ ἐδόκησεν ἐπαχλύουσαν ἴδεσθαι,— but the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form of his forsaken love, 1 vi. 309-312. dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower world. Other images are suggested by the poet's delicate sense of grace in flower or plant, combined with his tender compassion for the beauty of youth perishing prematurely. Such are those which enable us more vividly to realise the pathos of the death of Euryalus and of the burial of Pallas. Yet though these images are characteristically Virgilian, they also bear unmistakeable traces of imitation. The lines Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro and again— Qualem, virgineo demessum pollice, florem, Cui neque fulgor adhuc, nec dum sua forma recessit; recall not only the thought and feeling of Homer μήκων δ ̓ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν etc., but the cadences and most cherished illustrations of Catullus, in whose imagination the grace of trees and the bloom of flowers are ever associated with the grace and bloom of youth and youthful passion. Had Virgil lived to devote three more years to the revisal of his work, there is no reason to suppose that he would have added anything to its substance. Some inconsistencies of statement, as that between iii. 256 and vii. 123, would have disappeared, and some difficulties would have been cleared up. But the chief part of the limae labor' would have been employed in bringing the rhythm and diction of the poem to a more finished perfection than that which they exhibit at present. The unfinished lines in the poem would certainly have been completed and more closely connected with the passages immediately succeeding them. There is no indication that these lines were left purposely incomplete in order to give emphasis to some pause in the narrative. Virgil was the last poet likely to avail himself of so inartistic an innova tion to give variety to his cadences. For the most part they appear to be weak props ('tibicines1') used provisionally to fill up the gap between two passages, and indicating but not completing the thought that was to connect them. What more of elegance, of compact structure, or of varied harmony Virgil might have imparted to his rhythm, it is impossible to determine. We might conjecture that his aim would have been, as regards both expression and metrical effect, to act on the maxim 'ramos compesce fluentes,' than to give them ampler scope. In a long narrative poem like the Aeneid that perfect smoothness and solidity of rhythmical execution which characterises the Georgics-in which poem the position and weight of each single word in each single line is an element contributing to the whole effect-is hardly to be expected. A narrative poem demands a more easy, varied, and even careless movement than one of which the interest is contemplative, and which requires to be studied minutely line by line and paragraph by paragraph, before its full meaning is realised. If the movement in the Aeneid appears in some places rougher, or less compact, or more languid than in others, this may be explained not only by the imperfect state in which the poem was left, but by the difficulty or impossibility of maintaining the same uniform level of elevation in so long a flight. Yet it cannot be said that there is any loss of power, any trace of contentment with a lower ideal of perfection in the general structure of the verse of the Aeneid. The full capacities of the Latin hexameter for purposes of animated or impressive narrative, of solemn or pathetic representation, of grave or impassioned oratory, of tender, dignified, or earnest appeal to the higher emotions of man, are realised in many passages of the poem. Virgil's instrument fails, or, at least, is much inferior to Homer's, in aptitude for natural 1 'Ac ne quid impetum moraretur quaedam imperfecta transmisit, alia levissimis versibus veluti fulsit, quos per iocum pro tibicinibus interponi aiebat ad sustinendum opus, donec solidae columnae advenirent.' Donatus, quoted by Ribbeck in the Life prefixed to his smaller edition of Virgil. dialogue or for bringing familiar things in the freshness of immediate impression before the imagination. The stateliness of movement appropriate to such utterances as Ast ego quae Divom incedo regina does not readily adapt itself to the description of the process of kindling a fire or preparing a meal— Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates, Nutrimenta dedit rapuitque in fomite flammam. To English readers the verse of the Aeneid may appear inferior in majesty and fulness of volume to that of Milton in his passages of most sustained power; but it is easier and less encumbered and thus more adapted to express various conditions of human life than the ordinary movement of the modern epic. It flows in a more varied, weighty and self-restrained stream than the more homogeneous and overflowing current of Spenser's verse. The Latin hexameter became for Virgil an exquisite and powerful medium for communicating to others a knowledge of his elevated moods and pensive meditativeness, and for calling up before their minds that spectacle of a statelier life and a more august order in the contemplation of which his spirit habitually lived. The last revision would also have removed from the poem some redundancies, obscurities, and weakness of expression. There is a greater tendency to use 'otiose' epithets than in the Georgics, and a minute criticism has taken note of the number of times in which such words as 'ingens' and 'immanis' occur in the poem. Though the interpretation of the meaning of the Aeneid as a whole is probably as certain as that of any other great work of antiquity, yet there are passages in it which still baffle commentators in deciding which of two or three possible meanings was in the mind of the poet, or whether he had himself finally resolved what turn he should give his thought. As there are lines left incomplete, so there are lame conclusions to lofty and impassioned utterances of feeling. Such for instance is the prosaic and tautological conclusion of the passage in which Lausus is brought on the scene dignus, patriis qui laetior esset Imperiis et cui pater haud Mezentius esset. But it is only a microscopic observation of the structure of the poem that detects such blemishes as these. In the Aeneid Virgil's style appears as great in its power of reaching the secrets of the human spirit, as in the Georgics it proved itself to be in eliciting the deeper meaning of Nature. He combines nearly all the characteristic excellences of the great Latin writers. His language appears indeed inferior not only to that of Lucretius and Catullus but even to that of Ennius in reproducing the first vivid impressions of things upon the mind. The phrases of Virgil are generally coloured with the associations and steeped in the feeling of older thoughts and memories. Yet if he seems inferior in direct force of presentation, he unites the two most marked and generally dissociated characteristics of the masters of Latin style,—the exuberance and vivacity of those writers in whom impulse and imagination are strong, such as Cicero, Livy, and Lucretius,—the terseness and compactness of expression, arising either from intensity of perception or reflective condensation, of which the shorter poems of Catullus, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the writings of Sallust, and the memorial inscriptions of the time of the Republic and of the Empire afford striking examples. Virgil's condensation of expression often resembles that of Tacitus, and seems to arise from the same cause, the restraint imposed by reflexion on the exuberance of a poetical imagination. By its combination of opposite excellences the style of the Aeneid is at once an admirable vehicle of continuous or compressed narrative, of large or concentrated description, of fluent and impassioned, or composed and impressive oratory. It possesses also the power, which distinguishes the older Latin writers, of stamping some grave or magnanimous lesson in imperishable characters on the mind— |