"Nor, after that, in towns which walls enclose,
Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes;
But, rough, in open air he chose to lie;
Earth was his couch, his covering was the sky.
On hills unshorn, or in a desert den,
He shunn'd the dire society of men.
A shepherd's solitary life he led;
His daughter with the milk of mares he fed.
The dugs of bears, and every savage beast,
He drew, and through her lips the liquor press'd.
The little amazon could scarcely go,
He loads her with a quiver and a bow;
And, that she might her staggering steps command,
He with a slender javelin fills her hand.
Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound;
Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground.
Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread
Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head.
The flying dart she first attempts to fling,
And round her tender temples toss'd the sling;
Then as her strength with years increased, began
To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan,
And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane.
The Tuscan matrons with each other vied,
To bless their rival sons with such a bride;
But she disdains their love, to share with me
The sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.
And oh! I wish, contented with my cares
Of savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.
Then had she been of my celestial train,
And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.
But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goes
To find her death among forbidden foes,
Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,
Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.
This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,
This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:
By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,
Or of the Trojan or Italian train,
Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.
Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid
To bear the breathless body of my maid:
Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofaned
Her holy limbs with any human hand,
And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."
What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.
The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil.
We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems—a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Æneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Æneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "Æneas Fugitive."
How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia, to Æneas in marriage—the adverse interposition of Juno—her summoning of Alecto from hell—the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part—her maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and catches in her own madness all the Latian mothers—the INFURIATING of the young, gallant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself—a splendid scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise, sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for the very wrath she reveals her terrible self—then that exquisite incident, won from the new matter of the poet, from the PASTORAL manners with which he is historically obliged to deal in Italy—the Fury's third and last feat—her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman petted—and, thence, a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne—shutting himself up in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated temple of Janus.
All this is very poetical—is very different from the Iliad, and is perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and their fates.
Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original one—proper to person and place.
Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.
Footnotes: