Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its tone, might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast between Nature’s repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus consciously felt and expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious age. In Homer you may see such contrasts, as when Helen, looking from the walls of Troy, misses her true brothers from among the Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof from the war, fearing the reproach which she had brought on herself and them. And the poet adds:—
“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered
In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”
Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely, not brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin poet’s feeling is like that of our own day.
Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from his epic narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate description of the storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian Islands; the night passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard thundering overhead through the dark, in the third book; the island, in the fifth book, which is made the goal round which the racing-boats row; the fleet entering the mouth of the Tiber while the calm morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a few which come to mind.
But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that the Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s similes to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now give have not wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems small foundation for it in their case.
In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a narrow and sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty scraped through and shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s comparison:—
“As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,