Ite meae, quondam felix pecus, ite capellae[259].
In the passage of the same Eclogue, from 68–79,
En unquam patrios ... salices carpetis amaras,
Virgil tells, in language of natural pathos and exquisite grace, of the poor man’s sorrow in yielding his thatched hut, his well-trimmed fields, his corn crops, his pear-trees and his vines, the familiar sight of his goats feeding high up among the thickets of the rocks, to some rude soldier, incapable either of enjoying the charm or profiting by the richness of the land.
The three poems—the second, eighth, and tenth—of which love is the theme are all of a serious and plaintive cast. There are few touches in Virgil’s art descriptive either of the happier or the lighter and more playful experiences of the passion, which are the common theme of Horace’s Odes. Still less does he treat the subject in the style of Propertius and Ovid. The sentiment of Virgil is more like that of Tibullus; only Virgil gives utterance, though always in a dramatic form, to the real despair of unrequited affection (indigni amoris), while the tone of Tibullus is rather that of one yielding to the luxury of melancholy when in possession of all that his heart desires. They each give expression to that modern mood of passion, in which the heart longs to exchange the familiar life of civilisation for the rougher life of the fields, and to share some humble cottage and the daily occupations of peasant life with the beloved object[260]. In Virgil also there appears some anticipation of that longing for lonely communing with Nature in her wilder and more desolate aspects which we associate with romantic rather than with classical poetry.
Though, unlike all other Latin poets, Virgil avoids all reference to the sensual side of this passion, there is no ancient poet who has analysed and expressed, with equal truth and beauty and with such a chivalrous devotion, the fluctuations [pg 168]between hope and despair, the sense of personal unworthiness, the sweet memories, the heart-felt longings, the self-forgetful consideration and anxieties of an idealising affection. In such lines as these, expressing at once the sense of unworthiness and the rapid sinking of the heart from hope to despair—
Rusticus es Corydon, nec munera curat Alexis[261],
and again—
Tanquam haec sint nostri medicina furoris[262];
in the lines in which Damon traces back his love to its ideal source in early boyhood—