"Seek not, O son, to fathom the sorrows of thy kindred. The Fates, that
lend him, shall claim him; a jealous Heaven cannot spare such gifts to
Rome. Then, what outcry of manly grief shall shake the battlements of
the city! what a wealth of mourning shall Father Tiber see, as he sweeps
past his new-made grave! Never a Trojan who carried hopes so high, nor
ever the land of Romulus so gloried in a son."
(Octavia is listening.)
"Ah, piety! alas for the ancient faith! alas for the right hand so
stanch in battle! None, none could meet him, whether afoot or with
reeking charger he pressed the foe. Ah, unhappy youth! If by any means
thou canst break the harsh decrees of Fate, thou wilt be--Marcellus!"
It is Octavia's lost boy; and she is carried out fainting.
But Virgil receives a matter of ten thousand sesterces a line,--which,
allowing for difference in exchange and value of gold, may (or may not)
have been a matter of ten thousand dollars. With this bouncing bag of
sesterces, Virgil shall go upon the shelf for to-day.
* * * * *
I must name Horace for the reason of his "_Procul beatus_," etc., if I
had no other; but the truth is, that, though he rarely wrote
intentionally of country-matters, yet there was in him that fulness of
rural taste which bubbled over--in grape-clusters, in images of rivers,
in snowy Soracte, in shade of plane-trees; nay, he could not so much as
touch an _amphora_ but the purple juices of the hill-side stained his
verse as they stained his lip. See, too, what a garden pungency there is
in his garlic ode (III. 5); and the opening to Torquatus (Ode VII. Lib.
4) is the limning of one who has followed the changes of the bursting
spring with his whole heart in his eyes:--