II

ONE MARCH EVENING in my sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone
down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing
in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening
star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved
upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and
the dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their
place about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the
'Georgics' where tomorrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy
reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to
flee. 'Optima dies... prima fugit.' I turned back to the beginning of
the third book, which we had read in class that morning. 'Primus ego in
patriam mecum... deducam Musas'; 'for I shall be the first, if I live,
to bring the Muse into my country.' Cleric had explained to us that
'patria' here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little
rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not
a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might
bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian
mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own
little I country'; to his father's fields, 'sloping down to the river
and to the old beech trees with broken tops.'

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was
to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas,
crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than
survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the
perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the
matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself,
with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse
into my country.'

We left t