lust, and more deeply and truly in the beautiful preface to Livy's
History.[871] Livy there says that he devoted himself to the early
annals of Rome that he might shut his eyes to the evils of his own
time--"tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus."

This something wanting was then a feeling, a _religio_, if we can
venture to use the old word once more in the sense which I have so often
attributed to it. Not an unreasonable or ungovernable feeling, not a
_superstitio_, but a feeling of happy dependence on a higher Power, and
a desire to conform to His will in all the relations of human life. This
is the kind of feeling that had always lain at the root of the Roman
_pietas_, the sense of duty to family and State, and to the deities who
protected them. In the jarring of factions, the cruelty and bloodshed of
tyrants, and the luxurious self-indulgence of the last two generations,
the voice of _pietas_ had been silenced, the better instincts of
humanity had gone down. We have to see what was done by our poet to
awake that voice again and to put fresh life into those instincts. Only
let us remember that more permanent good is done in this world by a
beautiful nature giving itself its natural expression, than by precept
or denunciation; and beware of attributing to Virgil more direct
consciousness of his mission than he really felt. It is the nature of
the man that is of value to us in our studies, as it was to the Romans
in their despair, a nature ruled by sweet, calm feeling, full of
sympathy and full of hope.

The something wanting in others which we find in Virgil only, or in him
more convincingly felt and more resonantly expressed, is a kindly and
hopeful outlook on the world, with a deep and real sympathy for all
sorrow and pain. It is not the result of any definite religious
conviction; it is in the nature of the man, and is of the very fibre of
his being; but it made him a better religious teacher than the rest,
just because real religion is not a matter of reason only, or of
convention, or of art, but of feeling. This was the true antidote to
despair or depression--a sympathy with man in all he does or suffers,
not an indignant cry of remonstrance like that of Lucretius. Virgil's
sympathetic outlook includes not only Man, but the animal world, and
there can be no better proof that his feeling was genuine. The
nightingale robbed of her young,[872]

quem durus arator
o