Who cannot see from this how tenderly the man had watched the buzzing
yellow-jackets, as they circled and stooped in broad noon about some
little pool in the rills that flow into the Lago di Garda? For
hereabout, of a surety, the poet once sauntered through the noontides,
while his flock cropped the "milk-giving cytisus," upon the hills.
And charming hills they are, as my own eyes can witness: nay, my little
note-book of travel shall itself tell the story. (The third shelf, upon
the right, my boy.)
No matter how many years ago,--I was going from Milan, (to which place I
had come by Piacenza and Lodi,) on my way to Verona by Brescia and
Peschiera. At Desenzano, or thereabout, the blue lake of Benaco first
appeared. A few of the higher mountains that bounded the view were
still capped with snow, though it was latter May. Through fragrant
locusts and mulberry-trees, and between irregular hedges, we dashed down
across the isthmus of Sermione, where the ruins of a Roman castle flout
the sky.
Hedges and orchards and fragrant locusts still hem the way, as we touch
the lake, and, rounding its southern skirt, come in sight of the grim
bastions of Peschiera. A Hungarian sentinel, lithe and tall, I see
pacing the rampart, against the blue of the sky. Women and girls come
trooping into the narrow road,--for it is near sunset,--with their
aprons full of mulberry-leaves. A bugle sounds somewhere within the
fortress, and the mellow music swims the water, and beats with melodious
echo--boom on boom--against Sermione and the farther shores.
The sun just dipping behind the western mountains, with a disk all
golden, pours down a flood of yellow light, tinting the
mulberry-orchards, the edges of the Roman castle, the edges of the waves
where the lake stirs, and spreading out in a bay of gold where the lake
lies still.
Virgil never saw a prettier sight there; and I was thinking of him, and
of my old master beating off spondees and dactyls with a red ruler on
his threadbare knee, when the sun sunk utterly, and the purple shadows
dipped us all in twilight.
"_È arrivato, Signore!_" said the _vetturino_. True enough, I was at the
door of the inn of Peschiera, and snuffed the stew of an Italian supper.
Virgil closes the first book of the Georgics with a poetic forecast of
the time when ploughmen should touch upon rusted war-weapons in their
work, and turn out helmets empty, and bones of dead soldiers,--as indeed
they might, and did. But how unlike a poem it will sound, when the
schools are opened on the Rappahannock again, and the boy
scans,--choking down his sobs,--
"Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes,
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris,"
and the master veils his eyes!
I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican success, and became more
than ever an adulator of the ruling powers. I can fancy him at a palace
tea-drinking, where pretty court-lips give some witty turn to his "_Sic
Vos, non Vobis_," and pretty court-eyes glance tenderly at Master
Marius, who blushes, and asks some Sabina (not Poppæa) after Tibullus
and his Delia. But a great deal is to be forgiven to a man who can turn
compliments as Virgil turned them. What can be more exquisite than that
allusion to the dead boy Marcellus, in the Sixth Book of the Æneid? He
is reading it aloud before Augustus, at Rome. Mæcenas is there from his
tall house upon the Esquiline; possibly Horace has driven over from the
Sabine country,--for, alone of poets, he was jolly enough to listen to
the reading of a poem not his own. Above all, the calm-faced Octavia,
Cæsar's sister, and the rival of Cleopatra, is present. A sad match she
has made of it with Antony; and her boy Marcellus is just now
dead,--dying down at Baiæ, notwithstanding the care of that famous
doctor, Antonius Musa, first of hydropaths.
Virgil had read of the Sibyl,--of the entrance to Hades,--of the magic
metallic bough that made Charon submissive,--of the dog Cerberus, and
his sop,--of the Greeks who welcomed Æneas,--then of the father
Anchises, who told the son what brave fate should belong to him and
his,--warning him, meantime, with alliterative beauty, against the worst
of wars,--
"Ne, pueri, ne tanta animis assuescite bella;
Neu patriæ validas in viscera vertite vires,"--
too late, alas! There were those about Augustus who could sigh over
this.
Virgil reads on: Anchises is pointing out to Æneas that old Marcellus
who fought Hannibal; and beside him, full of beauty, strides a young
hero about whom the attendants throng.
"And who is the young hero," demands Æneas, "over whose brow a dark fate
is brooding?"
(The motherless Octavia is listening with a yearning heart.)