Past many a tranquil home; and round about
Innumerable tribes and nations flit.
As in the meadows in the summer-time
The bees besiege the various flowers, and swarm
About the snow-white lilies; and the field
Is filled with murmurings soft.”
The pathos, too, of his author—that exquisite pathos of Virgil which pervades the Æneid like a perfume, which one feels not more in the eloquent compression of the En Priamus wherewith Æneas recognizes his country’s painted woes on the walls of the Carthaginian temple, or the passionate heartbreak of the
“O patria, o divûm domus, Ilium, et incluta bello
Mœnia Dardanidum,”
or the subtle, touching beauty of the epitaph on Æolus, scarcely to be read even now without a quiver of the eyelids: