Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo.[60]
Here, as they fly before a southern wind, they are on their way to the north in the spring. But in another passage he seems rather to be thinking of autumn; it is where he is telling the husbandman how to presage an approaching storm, such a storm as descends in autumn from the Alps upon the plains of Lombardy:—
Nunquam imprudentibus imber
Obfuit; aut illum surgentem vallibus imis
Aeriae fugere grues, aut bucula coelum
Suspiciens patulis captavit naribus auras,
Aut arguta lacus circumvolitavit hirundo.[61]
The general tenor of the whole passage of which these lines are a fragment, as well as their original in the Diosemeia of Aratus, points to the approach of ‘hiems,’ the stormy season, as the event indicated; the falling leaves dance in air, the feathers of the moulting birds float on the water, but the swallow is not yet gone. The deep Alpine valleys seethe with swirling mist, which rises into gathering cloud, and soon becomes stormy rain beating upon the plains, as we may see it in any ‘Loamshire’ of our own, that lies below the stony hills of a wilder and wetter country-side. In this striking and truthful passage, Virgil has not followed his model too closely, but was evidently thinking of what he must often have witnessed himself.
The Stork is only mentioned by Virgil in a single passage—
Cum vere rubenti