Frost-bound winters and parching summers, storm and drought and flood, disease and blight, incessant toil and overshadowing death - labor et durae inclementia mortis are all shewn in it. Yet the divini gloria ruris which is his theme is hardly distinguishable, in virtue of the natural magic with which he penetrates it, from the Golden Age of the Fourth Eclogue. It was a glory attainable and actual in the Italy which he loved so passionately. "The praises of Italy," laudes Italiae, concentrated in the noble episode of the second book (11. 136-176), are the central motive of the whole poem. They became applied to it as a sort of second title. From the Tyrolese mountain-pastures among their castellated rocks, right down to the Calabrian forests and the great stretches of corn-land in the Apulian plains, there is no part of Italy left untouched in the picture: lake and mountain, hill-fortress and river-valley, coast and bay. In the Georgics, the Italy of poets and painters took shape for the first time and once for all. The vignettes of foreign countries, of Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, of the Scythian steppe and the African desert, of half-unknown realms in the rich and fabulous East, are introduced with exquisite skill so as to reinforce by contrast this central picture of the lady of lands, the donna e reina of later Italian poets. This was by itself a superb achievement. But it was not all. Virgil's interpretation and idealization of the Mother-country is interpenetrated with the ideals of a life lived in harmony with nature, of piety and simplicity, of unambitious happiness, of prosperous peace, of Roman virtue. And behind all these is his own profound humanity, his tenderness, his intense sympathy with all life, that of beasts and birds, of trees and flowers, even of winds and stars; and, deepest of all, his majestic sadness, his sense of the wonder and mystery of the world. The seven years bestowed on a poem of little over two thousand lines (less than a line a day, as it has been put arithmetically) were well spent over work which was even more a labor of distillation and rejection than of composition. As it left his hands, Virgil was for once satisfied with his own work. But a few years later it was subjected to a strange vicissitude. The poem had originally ended with an episode devoted, as the conclusion of the Eclogues had been, to the praise of Gallus. Since then, Gallus had climbed fast and far. He had been one of the generals at Actium, and there had been committed to him the viceroyalty of Egypt, a post which carried with it the keys of the Eastern Mediterranean world. The victory over Antony and the death of Cleopatra were, so far as indications or inferences enable us to judge, interwoven in this episode with a sketch of the historic wonders of Egypt. But Gallus, intoxicated by success, lost his head; he was recalled in disgrace; his fortune was confiscated, he was put on trial and sentenced to exile, and in the Roman manner, he fell on his own sword. The Georgics were recalled, and the conclusion cancelled and re-written. What we have lost by that disaster we cannot tell; some of the cancelled matter was pretty certainly used again by Virgil in the Eighth book of the Aeneid, and possibly elsewhere. What we have gained is the matchless episode of Orpheus and Eurydice. Its beauty silences criticism. But notwithstanding the great skill with which it is introduced, it could not be made, and it is not, an organic element in the structure of the poem. Yet we can hardly regret the enforced deviation from an otherwise rounded and faultless unity, when we consider that it not only gives us an unequalled masterpiece of feeling and expression, but adds to the Georgics, with an art beyond art, that last touch of haunting imperfection which makes Virgil more human, closer to ourselves, "not too steadfastly felicitous or too divinely alien to console." 15 It was one result of the slow distillation of the Georgics, of the infinite pains taken by Virgil in refining and rejecting, that though there is nowhere an idle line or a wasted word, the poem never hurries. It is leisurely in its smooth movement; peace seems to rest upon it. Virgil had fully mastered the art, in Dryden's celebrated phrase, of "saying much in little, and often in silence." He can get more volume of melody, more wealth of harmonic suggestion, into a few words than any other poet. His descriptions of sky and weather, of soils and crops, of the instruments of husbandry and the life of the farm have, with close truth to nature, a stateliness like Milton's and a natural magic as intense as that of Keats. It is here and there in Paradise Lost So high above the circling canopy Of night's extended shade, from Eastern point Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves; that we come nearest to the Virgilian splendour and the Virgilian magic, as they glow for instance in passages like Solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra vesper Temperat et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, Litoraque alcyonem resonant, acalanthida dumi;16 or the incomparable — Praeterea tam sunt Arcturi sidera nobis Haedorumque dies servandi et lucidus Anguis, Quam quibus in patriam ventosa per aequora vectis Pontus et ostriferi fauces temptantur Abydi. 16 Even single lines of technical statement, Area cum rimis ingenti aequanda cylindro — Multa adeo gelida melius se nocte dedere Quin etiam caeli regionem in cortice signant |