As Varro represents his speakers as looking on the great picture of Italy in the Temple of Tellus while they discuss the various ways of tilling and improving the soil, so Virgil in the midst of his didactic precepts holds up this ideal picture of the land to the love and admiration of his countrymen. By a few powerful strokes he combines the characteristic features and the great memories of Italian towns in lines which recur to every traveller as he passes through Italy,—
Adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem,
Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros[390].
No expression of patriotic sentiment in any language is more pure and noble than this. It is a tribute of just pride and affection to the land which, from its beauty, its history, its great services to man, is felt to be worthy of the deep devotion with which Virgil commends it to the heart and imagination of the world.
In the last of the great episodes which remains to be considered, all the higher thoughts and feelings by which beauty, dignity, and moral grandeur are given to the subject are found concurring; and the presence of Lucretius is again felt as a pervading influence, though modified by Virgil’s own deepest convictions and sympathies. The charm of peaceful contemplation, of Nature in her serenest aspect and harmony with the human soul, of an ethical idea based on religious belief and national traditions, of a life of pure and tranquil happiness, remote from the clash of arms and the pride and passions of the [pg 257]world, is made present to us in a strain of continuous and modulated music, which neither Virgil himself nor any other poet has surpassed. Virgil creates a new ideal of happiness for the contemplation of his countrymen by combining the old realistic delight in the husbandman’s life with the imaginative longing for the peace and innocence of a Saturnian Age, and with that new delight in the living beauty of the world and in the charm of ancient memories which it was his especial office to communicate. This ideal is contrasted, as is the older poet’s ideal of ‘plain living and high thinking,’ with the pomp and magnificence of city life,—
Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis
Mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam—
Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
Lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris[391],—