Mincius[264].
But this actively imaginative use of language seldom occurs in these poems. The general effect of the style is produced by the fulness of feeling, the sweetness or sonorousness of cadence, with which words, used in their familiar sense, are selected and combined. Such epithets as ‘mollis,’ ‘lentus,’ ‘tener’ are of frequent recurrence, yet the impression left by their use is not one of weakness, or of a satiating luxury of sentiment. The soft outlines and delicate bloom of Virgil’s youthful style are as true emblems of health as the firmer fibre and richer colouring of his later diction. What an affluence of feeling, what a deep sense of the happiness of life, of the beauty of the world, of the glory of genius, is conveyed by the simple use of the words fortunatus, formosus, divinus in the lines—
Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt—
Nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus—
Formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse—
Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta—
Ut Linus haec illi divino carmine pastor.
The effect he produces by the sound and associations of proper names is like that produced by Milton through the same instrument. Thus, to take one instance out of many, how suggestive of some golden age of pastoral song are the following lines, vague and conventional though their actual application appears to be in the passage where they occur:—
Non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus,
Nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit,