The actual description of winter has been criticised unfavourably, and not altogether without justice, by one of the most independent and at the same time most scholarly of English critics[368], who compares it with a corresponding passage in Thomson. It is inferior in simplicity and direct force of representation to the corresponding picture in Hesiod. Virgil’s imagination seems to require that even where the objects or scenes he describes are taken from books, they should be such that he could verify them in his own experience. It is this apparent verification, where the subject is not originally suggested by his own observation, that imparts the marvellous truthfulness to his art. Such lines as those—
Aeraque dissiliunt volgo—
to
Stiriaque impexis induruit horrida barbis—[369]
convey a less real impression of winter than the single line—an idealised generalisation from many actual winters—which ends the description of the various occupations and field-sports which an Italian winter offers to the husbandman:—
Cum nix alta iacet, glaciem cum flumina trudunt[370].
Perhaps none of the minor episodes recurs to the mind so often with so keen a feeling of delight as the passage at IV. 125 to 148, beginning ‘Namque sub Oebaliae,’ etc. Virgil here introduces himself in his own person, and draws a picture [pg 248]of one whom he had known, and who had interested him as actually realising that life of labour and of happiness in the results of his labour, which in the body of the poem is held up as an abstract ideal. The scene of this vivid reminiscence,—the district
Qua niger umectat flaventia culta Galaesus[371],—
seems to have had peculiar attraction both for Virgil and Horace. It is there—
umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi—