often had to
write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on;
and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain
hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes,
when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes
short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise
for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it
is not easy--when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer
strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought
with his most loving and exquisite skill--wholly to shut the door of
belief against the uncharitable suggestion,--that the Translator less
livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which
lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical
art.

The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and
his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and
poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road;
and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil
was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an
interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he
has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of
himself. The dexterous episode of Aristaeus, visited with a plague in his
bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by ending
consummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian
ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in
bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound
tenderness,--the creating high and pure spirit of beauty--the outwardly
watchful and sensitive eye and ear--with tones at will fetched by
listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn,
the sublime,--these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare
mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow
motions and varying hues of the now visible mind--which on the stream of
articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion
changes, a power of music,--these all are surprisingly contained within
the SEVENTY-FIVE VERSES which unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn
and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the
t