Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat!

“Oh, for the fields!  Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, where wander the Lacaenian maids!  Oh, that one would carry me to the cool valleys of Haemus, and cover me with the wide shadow of the boughs!  Happy was he who came to know the causes of things, who set his foot on fear and on inexorable Fate, and far below him heard the roaring of the streams of Hell!  And happy he who knows the rural deities, Pan, and Sylvanus the Old, and the sisterhood of the nymphs!  Unmoved is he by the people’s favour, by the purple of kings, unmoved by all the perfidies of civil war, by the Dacian marching down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of the Roman state, and the Empire hurrying to its doom.  He wasteth not his heart in pity of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what fruits the branches bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings forth; he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the records of the common weal”—­does not read the newspapers, in fact.

The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the Empire, the shame and dread of each day’s news, we too know them; like Virgil we too deplore them.  We, in our reveries, long for some such careless paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the Islands of the Southern Seas.  It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style.

But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought, that style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on telling a story that is only of feigned and foreign interest.  Doubtless it was the “AEneid,” his artificial and unfinished epic, that won Virgil the favour of the Middle Aces.  To the Middle Ages, which knew not Greek, and knew not Homer, Virgil was the representative of the heroic and eternally interesting past.  But to us who know Homer, Virgil’s epic is indeed, “like moonlight unto sunlight;” is a beautiful empty world, where no real life stirs, a world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but borrowed from “the sun of Greece.”

Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone.  He lived on the marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth’s reign.  Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the things that were alive for Homer.  What could Virgil care for a tussle between two stout men-at-arms, for the clash of contending war-chariots, driven each on each, like wave against wave in the sea?  All that tide had passed over, all the story of the “AEneid” is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle Ages of Sir Walter Scott; but the borrower had none of Scott’s joy in the noise and motion of war, none of the Homeric “delight in battle.”