tions, and finally by his initiation into the realms of the underworld, and the vision of the future there passed before him. In the final scene of the Reconciliation of the Gods, the crown is placed on the structure by a single majestic line linking the two names, Sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago.28 It is at once a prayer, a decree, and a benediction. In this fusion of the Itala virtus with the Romana potentia 29 lay in Virgil's time — as it does, under altered names, in ours — the hope of the world. It was racked in every joint. Alongside of gigantic territorial expansion had gone rapid disintegration of the machinery of government. The Asiatic provinces had been drained and plundered. Spain and Gaul, in which the strength of the West lay, were disorganized, only half assimilated, seething with revolt. Agriculture in Italy had almost gone to ruin. Reckless commercial speculation had brought about something like a general collapse. The enormous wastage of the Civil Wars had left the treasury empty and the State. bankrupt. Roman piety, Roman patriotism, seemed crumbling away. For the reconstruc tion of the new world there was needed a great effort of intelligence, a great re-establishment of production, and, above all, a great moral impulse. The task of Augustus when he returned from the East in 29 B.C. was something like that of Aeneas when he founded a new nation out of the wreckage of the Trojan War. The Georgics first, the Aeneid later and more fully, gave this task an imaginative embodiment. They recalled, with all the charm of poetry, the new generation into the old paths; and pointed them towards a new path in which the virtues of the past should be regained, in which a Roman Italy and an Italian Rome should go forward to rule and restore the world, should heal its wounds, give it peace and prosperity, bind it into one. In the Pollio, the so-called Messianic Eclogue, we see this ideal forming, as something dimly descried and mystically imagined. A Golden Age, long foretold and now close on the horizon, is based on the doctrine, which for Virgil had a deep fascination, of the Great Year, a cycle of thousands of years which returned into itself and after completion recommenced its course. In the Georgics this prophetic vision is no longer seen in an irides cent haze; it has taken definite shape and clear outline. The Golden Age is a reality: the Golden World has come. It is his own Italy, here and now, such as it is, if the Italian people would but realize it, sua si bona norint. Not once in a cycle of many thousand years, but perpetually in the common revolution of the seasons, a golden age returns. The earth, that never grudges to its children or cheats its lovers, iustissima tellus, is the same through the generations; richly blessed, fortunati nimium, are those who live, as they may if they will, the old Italian life Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini 30 which is also the life by which Rome rerum facta est pulcherrima, became the crown-jewel of the world. In this passion of patriotism Virgil even idealizes Roman Italy into an earthly paradise; he creates the lovely and imperishable illusion of life lived in it as a pure delight. Fundit humo facilem victum, he says of this land of his; the golden peace of an Indian summer, secura quies, broods over it. The countryman has only to reach out his hand and take what Earth offers Quos rami fructus, quos ipsa volentia rura and in lines as melodious as any that ever came even from his pen, Virgil paints, and almost persuades us to believe, the labour of husbandry as merely the effort to keep up with the prodigal beneficence of Nature: Nec requies, quin aut pomis exuberet annus But this lovely world of the Georgics is not even so the dream-world of the fourth Eclogue. Its magical beauty is relieved against a dark shadow. Over and over again Virgil comes back to the bitter truth of care, poverty, sickness, hard living — patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus; of the doom of unceasing toil Pater ipse colendi of parching summers and cruel winters, storm and flood, droughts and pestilences; of degeneration as the law not only for man but for Nature herself Sic omnia fatis In peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri; 34 of the angusti terminus aevi, and the handful of dust in which all ends; and he begins to look wistfully to the faith or hope- quidam dixere, "some have named it "of a life beyond this world. In the Aeneid, these lines of thought and feeling converge towards a higher synthesis. Gesta Populi Romani, "the achievements of the Roman People," a title under which the Aeneid went even in Virgil's own lifetime, gives the import of the whole poem as the expression of the Italo-Roman ideal. The splendours of past history, the majesty of the actual Empire, the limitless future prophesied and decreed for the Itala tellus and the Romana propago, combine in his picture. Yet even these are in the last resort phantasmal, the projection on a screen of the ultimate realities. On one side they are sharply set against sorrow and suffering, ill-allied love, |