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We shall not find in Virgil the bright speed, the unexhausted joyfulness, which, in spite of a view of life as grave as Virgil's own, make the Iliad and Odyssey unique in poetry; nor, which is more to the point as regards the Aeneid, the narrative power, the genius for story-telling, which is one of the rarest of literary gifts, and which Ovid alone among the Latin poets possessed in any high perfection.
It was Virgil's dream and Spenser's; and some secret there was something still in our breasts that made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened with sweet thoughts. And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her poet.
Thus does one of Virgil's characters describe the effect his mind produced upon his body in a terrible situation. Mr. Hazel had always ridiculed that trite line as a pure exaggeration; but he altered his opinion after that eventful night.
He could tell you how many public baths exited in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of Mehemet Ali's whiskers, why the manuscript of Virgil's friend Gallius had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year, and what month, the decimal system was introduced into Finland. Such aimless incursions into knowledge were a puzzle to his friends, but not to himself.
In this paper I will give a rapid sketch of Dante's life, and then will try to point to some of the features of a poem which must ever take its place among the supremest efforts of the human intellect, side by side with Homer's "Iliad," and Virgil's "Æneid," and Milton's "Paradise Lost," and the plays of Shakespeare; and which is not less great than any of these in its immortal and epoch-making significance.
She examined two other books, one a copy of Virgil's "Aeneid," and the second "The Tatler," but no clue could she obtain as to the identity of the owner. In one of them, however, she did find where a name had been scratched out, as with a knife. Taking up again the copy of Shakespeare's works, she glanced at the play where the book was lying open.
King Robert, a wise though far from poetical monarch, conducted his friend Petrarch with great solemnity to the spot; and, pointing to the entrance of the grotto, very gravely asked him, whether he did not adopt the general belief, and conclude this stupendous passage derived its origin from Virgil's powerful incantations? The answer, I think, may easily be conjectured.
How many parties have fallen, who seem to have laboured only to transmit a dear-bought tyranny, which they had not time to enjoy themselves, to their successors: The French revolutionists may, indeed, adopt the motto of Virgil's Bees, "Not for ourselves, but for you."
Keeping clear of all imitation of Virgil's Georgics, he describes the year of the Tuscan peasant, beginning with the late autumn, when the countryman gets ready his new plough and prepares the seed for the winter. The picture of the meadows in spring is full and beautiful, and the 'Summer' has fine passages; but the vintage-feast in autumn is one of the gems of modern Latin poetry.
"Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a verb, "to plough," "to harrow." I employ this agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing Virgil's Georgics and Bucolics, for which Varro's treatises furnished the foundations.
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