that Propertius pictures to himself Virgil meditating his Aeneid and still conning over his earlier Eclogues—
Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus.
It is to ‘that nook of earth’ that Horace looks, if the unkind Fates forbid his residence at his favourite Tibur, for a resting-place for his ‘age to wear away in.’ But it is not only to the local charm that attention is drawn, and to the beauty of plant, flower, and fruit, created by the labour of love which the old Cilician gardener—some survivor probably from the Eastern wars of Pompey—bestowed on his neglected spot of ground. Here also the true moral of the poem is pointed, that in the life of rural industry there is a deep source of happiness altogether independent of wealth, and which wealth cannot buy:—
Regum aequabat opes animis, seraque revertens
Nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis[372].
A more prominent place is assumed by the two episodes with which the third and fourth Books close. In the first of these, which extends from line 478 to 566, and which describes a great outbreak of cattle-plague among the Noric Alps and the district round the Timavus,—a locality which seems to have had a special attraction to Virgil’s imagination[373],—he aims at painting a rival picture to that of the plague at Athens [pg 249]with which the poem of Lucretius ends. It would be unfair to compare the unfinished piece of the older poet, overcrowded as it is with detail and technical phraseology, with an elaborate specimen of Virgil’s descriptive power, exercised on a kind of subject in which the speculative genius of the one poet gave him no advantage over the careful and truthful art of the other. Yet, as has been already pointed out[374], there are here and there strokes of imaginative power in the larger sketch, and marks of insight into human nobleness, roughly indeed expressed, as at 1243–6—
Qui fuerant autem praesto, contagibus ibant
Atque labore, pudor quem tum cogebat obire
Blandaque lassorum vox mixta voce querellae.
Optimus hoc leti genus ergo quisque subibat[375]—