No poet ever less admired mere outward success, and felt more sure that there is a tribunal somewhere which will test men and things by another standard, according to which "a noble aim Faithfully kept is as a noble deed In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed." You remember his "Learn, O boy! from me what virtue means and genuine toil. Let others teach you the meaning of success." While gentleness and natural piety are Virgil's characteristic virtues, hardly less prized by him is another virtue which might seem opposed to these; I mean patience, fortitude, manly endurance. 'Whate'er betide, every misfortune must be overcome by enduring this is the undertone of all his morality. Again, another side of his unworldliness appears in this, that his heart refuses to find full satisfaction in anything here. Not wealth, not honor, not future fame, not the loveliness of nature, not the voice of friend, are enough for him. For, even if for a time they pleased, does he not keenly feel that "Poor mortals that we are, our brightest days of life Are ever the first to fly"? This has been called pessimism in Virgil. It is, however, only his keen feeling of the transitory and unsufficing nature of all earthly things. He does not rail at it, as some poets have done; he upbraids neither the world nor the power that made it, but accepts it and learns from it reverent patience. And this experience would seem to have wakened within him a longing and aspiration after something purer, higher, lovelier, than anything which earth contains. His poetry has the tone as of one who, in his own words, "Was stretching forth his hands with longing desire for the farther shore." Therefore, while we may not accept, as former ages did, the fourth Eclogue as in any sense a prophecy of the Messiah, we need not be blind to that which it does contain the hope of better things, the expectation that some relief was at hand for the miseries of an outworn and distracted world. This expectation was, we know, widely spread in Virgil's day, and probably none felt it more than he. Likely enough he expected that the relief would come from the establishment and universal sway of Roman Dominion; but the ideal empire, as he conceived it, was something more humane and beneficent than anything earth had yet seen something such as Trajan may perhaps have dreamed of, but which none ever saw realized. His conception of the future work, which he imagined the Empire had to do, contained elements which belonged to a kingdom not of this world. Of his enthusiastic predictions regarding it, we may say, in Keble's words, "Thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given.” Taking, then, all these qualities of Virgil together, his purity, his unworldliness, his tenderness towards the weak and down-trodden, his weariness of the state of things he saw around him, his lofty ideal, his longing for a higher life in him it may be said that the ancient civilization reached its moral culmination. Here was, as least, one spirit, "who lived and died in faith," and kept himself unspotted from the world. It was this feeling about Virgil, probably, which gave rise to the legend, that St. Paul on his journey to Rome turned aside to visit the poet's tomb near Naples, and that, weeping over it, he exclaimed "What a man would I have made of thee, Had I found thee alive, O greatest of the poets!" In the words of the old Latin hymn "Ad Maronis Mausoleum Poetarum maxime!” CHAPTER VII. SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. LYRICAL poetry is poetry in its intensest and purest form. Other kinds of poetry may be greater, more intellectual, may combine elements more numerous and diverse, and demand more varied powers for their production; but no other kind contains within the same compass so much of the true poetic ore, of that simple and vivid essence which to all true poetry is the breath of life. [For what is it that is the primal source, the earliest impulse, out of which all true poetry in the past has sprung, out of which alone it ever can spring? Is it not the descent upon the soul, or the flashing up from its inmost depths, of some thought, sentiment, emotion, which possesses, fills, kindles it—as we say, inspires it It may be some new truth, which the poet has been the first to discern. It may be some world-old truth, borne in upon him so vividly, that he seems to have been the first man who has ever seen it. New to him, a new dawn, as it were, from within, the light of it makes all it touches new. In remote times, before poetry had worn itself into conventional grooves, it was only some impulse torrent-strong, some fountain of thought bursting from the deepest and freshest places of the soul, that could cleave for itself channels of utterance. In later times, when a poetic language had been framed, poetic forms stereotyped, and poetry had become an art, or even a literary trade, a far feebler impulse might borrow these forms, and express itself poetically. But originally it was not so. In primitive times, as Ewald says, it was only the marvellous overmastering power, the irresistible impulse of some new and creative thought, which, descending upon a man, could become within him the spirit and impelling force of poetry. To our modern ears all this sounds unreal, - a thing you read of in æsthetic books, but never meet with in actual life. Our civilization, with its stereotyped ways and smooth conventionalities, has done so much to repress strong feeling; above all, English reserve so peremptorily forbids all exhibition of it, even when most genuine, that, if any are visited by it, they must learn to keep it to themselves, and be content to know "the lonely rapture of lonely minds." And yet even in this century of ours such things have been possible. A modern poet, whose own experience and productions exemplified his words, has said, "A man cannot say, I will write poetry; the greatest poet cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some irresistible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness. This power arises from within, like the color of a flower which dims and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature with our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only on the wrinkled sand which paves it. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." This, if in a measure true of all poetry, is especially |