Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,
Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinions
Loudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm air
Skims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”
Again, when Æneas, led by the Sibyl, descends to the nether world, and arrives at the shores of the river Styx, the ghosts of the dead come flocking round him in crowds:—
“Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s cold
Gliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward from the deep,
When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into sunny lands.”
The full beauty, however, of passages like these cannot be felt when they are detached from the whole scene, in which they are inlaid. Æneas traveling far into the nether gloom, through Pluto’s empty halls and ghastly realms of the dead, is a picture almost too dismal. But how exquisitely does Virgil relieve his own heart and that of the reader, by letting in on that sad world these glimpses of a land still gladdened by the sun!
If you compare Virgil with Homer, where they describe the same natural objects, or even where the Latin poet borrows his similes directly from the Greek, you cannot but feel how wide is the difference between them. There is no more the entire outwardness, the self-forgetting serenity of Homer’s descriptions, the colorless transparency as of a mountain range, whose every stone and blade of grass lies reflected in the clear depths of an unmoving lake. Received into Virgil’s heart the outward world becomes colored with some of the melancholy of the poet and his time. Not that to Virgil’s eye there was any sadness in Nature herself, but in his hands Nature becomes so humanized, it so lends itself to human joys and sorrows, that these cast their own gleams, and still more their shadows, on that, in itself, unimpassioned countenance. This sympathy between man and Nature Virgil apprehended more feelingly than any other Roman poet; and in this, as in so many other things, we find in him an anticipation of the modern time. As compared with Lucretius, Virgil deals with Nature in a less sublime, but more human way. Lucretius demands the explanation of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: “Lucretius is not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery, to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on condition that I may investigate and understand thee.” In Lucretius man and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction,—satisfaction as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.