It is a wonderful work.  Virgil was a practical farmer; he tells you correctly what to do.  But he makes a work of art of it all poetical.  He suffuses his directions for stock-raising and cabbage-hoeing with the light of mythology and poetry.  He gives you the Golden Age and Saturn’s Italy, and makes the soil seem sacred.  He had the Gaul’s feeling for grace and delicacy, and brought in Celtic beauty to illumine the Italian world.  The lines are impregnated with the soul, the inner atmosphere, of the Italian land; full of touches such as that lovely

     Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,

of violets and popies and narcissus; quinces and chestnut trees.  All that is of loveliness in rural (and sacred) Italy is there; the landscapes are there, still beautiful; and the dignity and simplicity of the old agricultural life.  It is a practial treatise on farming; yet a living poem.

Horace too played up for his friend Maecenas and for Caesar.  Maecenas gave him that Sabine farm; and Horace made Latin songs to Greek meters about it:  made music that is a marvel to this day, so that it remains a place of pilgrimage, and you can still visit, I believe, that

     fons Bandusia splendidiot vitro

that he loved so well and set such sweet music to.  He give you that country as Virgil gives you the valley vistas, not unfringed with mystery, of Appenines and the north.  Between them, Italy is there, as it had never been interpreted before.  If—­in Virgil at least—­there is a direct practical purpose, there is no less marvelous art and real vision of Nature.

And then Augustus set both of them to singing the grandeur of Rome; to making a new patriotism with their poetry; to inspiring Roman life with a sense of dignity,—­a thing it needed sorely:  Virgil in the Aeneid (where also, as we have seen, he taught not a little Theosophy); Horace in the Carmen Saeculare and some of the great Odes of the third and fourth books.  The lilt of his lines is capable of ringing, and does so again and again, into something very like the thrill and resonance of the Grand Manner.  Listen for it especially in the third and fourth lines of this: 

     Quid debeas, o Roma, Neronibus
     Testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal
          Devictus, et pulcher fugatis
               Ille dies Latio tenebris.

I am not concerned here to speak of his limitations; nor of Virgil’s; who, in whatever respect the Aeneid may fall short, does not fail to cry out in it to the Romans.  Remember the dignity and the high mission of Rome!—­By all these means Augustus worked towards the raising of Roman ideals.