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I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at the luxurious wine, 'Men and gentle women under a bush! 'It really cannot have been ping-pong that they played at, sitting. Bridge, more likely, said Merton.
Instruction, to bring her its full profit, must be conveyed through the medium of moral emotion, but the mysterious power of feeling to stimulate intellect was with her immense. She turned now to the poets Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope.
But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis well known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and quarrelsome lumbermen, "Virge," the irascible, kind-hearted, indefatigable, was there no longer. He had made his last clearing, and fought his last fight; done his last favour to a friend, and thrown his last adversary out of the tavern door. His last log had gone down the river.
Though in this style Hesiod was the model of Virgil, his system is perfectly Italian, so much so, that many of his rules may be traced in modern Italian husbandry, just as the descriptions of implements in the Greek poet are frequently found to agree with those in use in modern Greece.
He has aspired to emulate the philosophical eloquence of Cicero, as well as the poetical majesty of Virgil. His essay on the Remedies of Good and Evil Fortune is a singular work in a colloquial form, and a most scholastic style. It seems to be framed upon the model of the Tusculan Questions, with what success those who have read it may easily determine.
As in the strange legend preserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who tells us that Helen wore a red "star-stone," whence fell gouts of blood that vanished ere they touched her swan's neck; so all the blood shed for her sake leaves Helen stainless. Of Homer's Helen we know no more.
But the Golden Age, so fondly hoped for, so vaguely and poetically conceived, was not to come in the sense in which Virgil, or any other serious thinker of the day, could dream of it. I may conclude this chapter with a few sentences which express this most truly and eloquently.
Trifling as this circumstance is, nothing that throws any light on the growth of Virgil's muse can be wanting in interest. Virgil was not one of those who startle the world by their youthful genius. His soul was indeed a poet's from the first, but the rich perfection of his verse was not developed until after years of severe labour, self-correction, and even failure.
He reads Homer and Virgil, and learns to mend his song, and the poet would have told us how he learnt to sing still better, if sorrow for the death of a friend had not put a period to his own labours. The poem thus comes abruptly to an end; and we are not much concerned that there is no more of it.
And, we gather from H.P. Blavatsky, the only Mysteries that survived in their integrity to anything like this time had been those at Bibracte which Caesar destroyed. Virgil, in the year 40 B.C., being then a pastoral poet imitating Theocritus, nothing very serious, wrote a strange poem that stands in dignity and depth of purpose far above anything in his model.
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