But Molière in The Misanthrope did it all the time. It is not single lines (though I have quoted one); it is the whole river of the thing, high in flood-tide, up to the top of its banks, broad, deep, majestic, and upon a scale to which (one would have thought) mere man could never reach.
All that!
For two hours, hearing this thing, I was quite outside the world; and the memory of it is a possession which should endure, I think, for ever; by which word I mean, even beyond the limitations of this life. But therein I may be wrong.
ON THE "BUCOLICS" OF VIRGIL, A CAFÉ IN PARIS, THE LENGTH OF ESSAYS, PHŒBUS, BACCHUS, A WANTON MAID, AND OTHER MATTERS
A fruitful subject for discussion in these days of war, foreign and civil, ruin, approaching pestilence, eclipse and veiling of the gods, is the proper place in which to read the Bucolics of the poet Virgil.
Some would suggest a pastoral scene—a rising mound near some clear river, or even the shade of a beech. Others a library brown with age, dusty, and (please God) all the windows shut; oaken also, the roof not high, the whole cut up into little compartments each with a wicket-gate as libraries should be. Others would suggest bed—though that connotes a complete acquaintance with the text. Others a railway journey, for on such an occasion the mind is well cut off from interference by modern things: that is, supposing the railway journey to be a fast one between two very distant points—for there is no more distracting passage of time than a journey in a slow train which stops at every station.
Others have suggested ship-board, which seems to me simply silly. For, apart from the difficulty of reading anything at sea, there is the gross unsuitability of time and place for the lovely lines of the Eclogues.
And so on. It is a weighty matter for discussion, and one that can never end, because it all turns upon an individual whim.