So again of the shepherd:—
—In th’ evening of a fair sunny day,
With joy he sees his flocks and kids to play,
And loaded kine about his cottage stand,
Inviting with known sound the milker’s hand;
And when from wholesome labour he doth come,
With wishes to be there, and wish’d for home,
He meets at door the softest human blisses,
His chaste wife’s welcome, and dear children’s kisses.
Of a similar kind is Cowley’s translation of Claudian’s Old Man of Verona:—
Happy the man who his whole time doth bound
Within th’ enclosure of his little ground.—
Him no false distant lights, by fortune set,
Could ever into foolish wanderings get;—
No change of consuls marks to him the year:
The change of seasons is his calendar:
The cold and heat winter and summer shows;
Autumn by fruits, and spring by flow’rs, he knows:—
A neighb’ring wood born with himself he sees,
And loves his old contemporary trees.
The most original bit of Pastoral in Virgil (if it be his) is to be found in a poem of doubtful authority called the Gnat (Culex), which has been beautifully translated by Spenser. It is a true picture, combining the elegance of Claude with the minuteness of the Flemish painters:—
The fiery sun was mounted now on height
Up to the heavenly towers, and shot each where
Out of his golden charet glistering light;
And fayre Aurora, with her rosie haire,
The hatefull darkness now had put to flight;
When as the shepherd, seeing day appeare,
His little goats gan drive out of their stalls,
To feede abroad, where pasture best befalls.
To an high mountain’s top he with them went,
Where thickest grasse did cloath the open hills:
They, now amongst the woods and thicketts ment,
Now in the vallies wandring at their wills,
Spread themselves farre abroad through each descent;
Some on the soft green grasse feeding their fills;
Some, clambering through the hollow cliffes on hy,
Nibble the bushie shrubs which growe thereby.
Others the utmost boughs of trees doe crop,
And brouze the woodbine twigges that freshly bud;
This with full bit doth catch the utmost top
Of some soft willow or new-growen stud;
That with sharpe teeth the bramble leaves doth lop,
And chaw the tender prickles in her cud;
The whiles another high doth overlooke
Her own like image in a cristall brook.
This is picturesque and charming. Yet Virgil, though a country-loving, and also an agricultural poet, would have been nothing as a pastoral poet without Theocritus, and, as it was, he spoiled him. We shall see in what manner, when we come to speak of Pope.
