"Seek not, O son, to fathom the sorrows of thy kindred. The Fates, that lend him, shall claim him; a jealous Heaven cannot spare such gifts to Rome. Then, what outcry of manly grief shall shake the battlements of the city! what a wealth of mourning shall Father Tiber see, as he sweeps past his new-made grave! Never a Trojan who carried hopes so high, nor ever the land of Romulus so gloried in a son."
(Octavia is listening.)
"Ah, piety! alas for the ancient faith! alas for the right hand so stanch in battle! None, none could meet him, whether afoot or with reeking charger he pressed the foe. Ah, unhappy youth! If by any means thou canst break the harsh decrees of Fate, thou wilt be—Marcellus!"
It is Octavia's lost boy; and she is carried out fainting.
But Virgil receives a matter of ten thousand sesterces a line,—which, allowing for difference in exchange and value of gold, may (or may not) have been a matter of ten thousand dollars. With this bouncing bag of sesterces, Virgil shall go upon the shelf for to-day.
I must name Horace for the reason of his "Procul beatus," etc., if I had no other; but the truth is, that, though he rarely wrote intentionally of country-matters, yet there was in him that fulness of rural taste which bubbled over—in grape-clusters, in images of rivers, in snowy Soracte, in shade of plane-trees; nay, he could not so much as touch an amphora but the purple juices of the hill-side stained his verse as they stained his lip. See, too, what a garden pungency there is in his garlic ode (III. 5); and the opening to Torquatus (Ode VII. Lib. 4) is the limning of one who has followed the changes of the bursting spring with his whole heart in his eyes:—
Diffugere nives, redeunt jam gramina campis,"—
every school-boy knows it: but what every school-boy does not know, and but few of the masters, is this charming, jingling rendering of it into the Venetian dialect:—
"La neve xè andàda,
Su i prài torna i fieri
De cento colori,
E a dosso de i àlbori
La fogia è tornada
A farli vestir.