“What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?
For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south wind,
Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,
Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”
Of these and such-like images the first hints may have been from Theocritus, but assuredly they have won a new charm in their passage through the mind of Virgil.
But if the scenery of the Eclogues partakes in some measure of the conventional mould in which the whole of the poems are cast, the Georgics are poetry in earnest, dealing with a real subject, and describing, in many places at least, real landscapes. Doubtless here, too, as everywhere, Virgil is the learned poet; his mind comes to his subject laden with the spoils of all antiquity. As he describes natural objects, all the associations which ancient Mythology and Greek poetry had thrown around them use spontaneously before him. Thus he would often seem to look at things not at first-hand with his own eyes, but through the media which former poets had fashioned for him. But this, if we think of it, is one element of the consummate art of the Georgics. The poet had to raise a homely subject above the dust of commonplace, to add dignity to objects and processes which in themselves might seem undignified, or even vulgar. Therefore he takes the husbandman back to earlier times, and invests his toils with all the veneration and sanctity which primeval tradition has shed around them, and teaches him to feel that in his pursuits he is one with the first forefathers of the race. This archaic coloring, richly yet delicately suffused, invests the poem with a peculiar charm. Just so a modern poet, wishing to throw around the life of shepherd and husbandman, even in our own days, an air of ancient reverence, might still revert to Bible stories of the patriarchs—to Jacob and Rachel meeting by the well, to Ruth in the corn-field, and David among the sheep-cotes of Bethlehem. But making full allowance for all that is archaic and mythological in the allusions to distant ages and Eastern lands, there remains a large background of landscape in which the plains of Mantua and Campania lie spread before us, and the intense skies of Italy bend overhead.
Such a passage as the following is surely the work of one who had watched and loved the alternations of the Italian summer:—
“But when glad summer at the west winds’ call
Shall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,
Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fields