The third Book is pervaded by the feeling of the sea,—not as in the Odyssey of its buoyant and inexhaustible life, nor yet of the dread which it inspired in the earliest mariners,—but in that more modern mood in which it unfolds to the traveller the animated spectacle of islands and coasts famous for their beauty or their historic and legendary associations. In the fifth Book, as is pointed out by Chateaubriand, the effect of the limitless and monotonous prospect of the open sea in producing a sense of weariness and melancholy, such as that expressed in ‘The Lotus-eaters’—
‘but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam,’
is profoundly felt in the passage—
At procul in sola secretae Troades acta
Amissum Anchisen flebant cunctaeque profundum
Pontum adspectabant flentes; ‘heu tot vada fessis
Et tantum superesse maris,’ vox omnibus una[669].
It was seen how the sense of supernatural awe adds to the tragic grandeur of the despair and death of Dido, as in the lines, which bear some trace of a vivid passage in Ennius—