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Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering.
Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such primitive pleasures the shepherds of the Virgilian eclogue indulged. As the life of the peasant, so is that of his wife or sweetheart. She shares in the work, guiding the oxen, cutting grass, even working on the road with hoe and basket.
The Virgilian movement differs not more from the Homeric, than does the Horatian sapphic or alcaic from the same metres as treated by their Greek inventors. The success of Horace may be judged by comparing his stanzas with the sapphics of Catullus on the one hand, and the alcaics of Statius on the other.
"The falling out of faithful friends" as the old copybooks say in elegant Virgilian Latin "renewing is of love." And so it was with Oliver and Wraysford. Why, they were twice the friends they were before! Twice! Fifty times!
The superb Virgilian economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of the whole significance.
He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of "Green Sussex fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea." The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the
"Truly," he thought, "this is the city of the flower, and the lily is its fitting emblem." But while his heart went out towards his native town he felt a sharp pang as he remembered that the flower of flowers, the queen of the lilies, had been mowed down by the scythe, and the city which to him had heretofore been an altar was now a tomb. The lovely Virgilian dirge,
The Virgilian phrases, with their grave pity, are steeped in a golden softness that is just touched with a far-off trouble, a pathetic waver in the voice as if tears were not far below it.
Those who could follow his allusions were delighted beyond measure, and the House took its cue from them and laughed and cheered uproariously at many things it did not understand. Mr Gladstone acted as a sort of fugleman, and his rejoicing chuckle at some happy ironic application of a Virgilian or Homeric phrase was a cue which was instantly seized upon.
The time had arrived when parliamentary preeminence could no longer be achieved or maintained by gorgeous abstractions borrowed from Burke, or shallow systems purloined from De Lolme, adorned with Horatian points, or varied with Virgilian passages.
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