The Eclogues And Georgics Of Virgil Translated Into English Verse

And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring From which such copious floods of elo4uence Have issued I with front abashd replied Glory and light of all the tuneful train May it avail me, that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have connd it oer. My master thou, and guide CARYS Dante. -- INTRODUCTION -- Thou that singest wheat and woodland, Tilth and vineyard, hive, and horse and herd All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word Poet of the happy Tityrus Piping underneath his beechen bowers Poet of the poet-satyr Whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers. TENNYSON. Throughout the Middle Ages Virgil was a beneficent wizard, a romance-writer and a sorcerer, his name recurring strangely among all the greatest names of history or fable. To the scholarship of the Renaissance he became a poet again, but still Prince of poets, still with something of divine attributes. For us, who inherit from all these ages, he is the gathered sum of what to all these ages he has been. But it is as a voice of Nature that he now appeals to us most as a voice of one who in his strength and sweetness is not too steadfastly felicitous to have sympathy with human weakness and pain. Through the imperial roll of his rhythm there rises a note of all but intolerable pathos and in the most golden flow of his verse he still brings us near him by a faint accent of trouble. This is why he beyond all other poets is the Comforter and in the darkest times, when the turmoil within or around us, confuse sonus urbis et iZZetabile murmur, seems too great to sustain, we may still hear him saying, as Dante heard him in the solemn splendour of dawn on the Mountain of Purgatory Myson, here may be agony, but not death remember, remember -J. W. MACKAIL. THE earlier and later Virgil of the Eclogues and the Georgics has never yet quite reached his mark in English. It is easy for a great narrative and heroic poem, dealing with a consummate epic theme, to triumph over a foreign tongue. It is much harder for a set of select pastorals, or for writings like the Georgics, that depend on the grace, imagination, and style of their writer, to be made really effective and ideally alive in translation. But in reading the dneid, whether in Drydens or some more modern version like Fairfax Taylors, if we have anything at all of Tennysons sense of Virgil the landscape-lover and lord of language, expressed in his memorial lines, we are left with an insatiable thirst for other vintages. For there, if we have learnt to be possessed by the golden theme- Ilion falling, Rome arising, Wars, and filial faith, and Didos pyre we are not less held by the spirit and individuality of the poet. Once having formed our first oncoming attachment to Virgil, we, his English readers, must wish to know him too in his Eclogues and his Geo gics, and in those reflections of his life and habit to be found in pages more intimate than an epic in its large poetry can allow. No doubt there is a temptation in all his poems to look for more than Virgil ever meant to give. But it is part of the delightful interest of the Eclogues, that we seem there to be continually surprising the young craftsman, either in his prentice work, studying his craft and unblushingly imitating his forerunners, or casting furtive shadows of himself and his history on the idyllic grass where Tityrus and Corydon are the idealcounterfeits. Professor Nettleship, in an essay accompanying his reprint of the Atzcient Lives of Viygil published by the Clarendon Press in 1879, worked out comparatively after a most interesting fashion some of the cross-evidences that bear on the poets life afforded by Suetonius and others...