“So with their weapons every show of very fight they stir”;
“But learn me now who fain the sooth would wot”;
“About me senseless, throughly feared with marvels grim and great”;
“And many a saying furthermore of God-loved seers of old
Fears her with dreadful memories”;
“Nor was he worser than himself in such a pinch bestead”
—such lines in a translator to whom this dialect was still a living language would not seem unnatural. They would be simply the expression of the effect made by Virgil on the mind of that age, and so far, since every age has its own idiom, they would not necessarily be un-Virgilian at all. Even such extraordinary phrases as
“An ash ...
Round which, sore smitten by the steel, the acre biders throng,
And strive in speeding of the axe,”