Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges[362],
and at ii. 387,
Et te, Bacche, vocant per carmina laeta, tibique
Oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu[363],
not only afford a legitimate relief to the inculcation of practical precepts in the Georgics, but impress on the mind the dignity imparted to the most ordinary drudgery by the sense of its association with the religious life of man.
On the other hand, it is to be noticed how sparingly Virgil uses one of the grandest resources in the repertory of Lucretius,—that of imaginative analogies, through which familiar or unseen phenomena are made great or palpable by association with other phenomena which immediately affect the imagination with a sense of wonder and sublimity. The apprehension of these analogies between great things in different spheres proceeds from the inventive and intellectual faculty in the imagination,—that by which intuitions of vast discoveries are obtained before observation and reason can verify them; and in this faculty of imaginative reason Lucretius is as superior to Virgil, as Virgil is to him in artistic accomplishment. One of the few ‘similes’ in the Georgics is that often-quoted one, in which the difficulty which man has in holding his own against the natural deterioration of things is compared to the difficulty which a rower has in holding his own against a strong adverse current (i. 201–203):—
Non aliter, quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum
Remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit
Atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni[364].
There is suggestiveness and verisimilitude in this image. But it does not make us feel the enlargement of mind and the poetic thrill of the thought which are produced by many of the great [pg 241]illustrative images in Lucretius. Virgil too is much inferior to the older poet, and much less original, in the general reflections on life which he occasionally introduces,—such as that at iii. 66,—