e, how
it was based, by the Magician Virgilius, on an egg, and how the city
shakes when the frail foundation chances to be stirred? This too vast
empire of ours is as frail in its foundation, and trembles at a word. So
it was with the Empire of Rome in Virgil's time: civic revolution
muttering within it, like the subterranean thunder, and the forces of
destruction gathering without. In Virgil, as in Horace, you constantly
note their anxiety, their apprehension for the tottering fabric of the
Roman state. This it was, I think, and not the contemplation of human
fortunes alone, that lent Virgil his melancholy. From these fears he
looks for a shelter in the sylvan shades; he envies the ideal past of the
golden world.

_Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat_!

"Oh, for the fields! Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, where wander the
Lacaenian maids! Oh, that one would carry me to the cool valleys of
Haemus, and cover me with the wide shadow of the boughs! Happy was he
who came to know the causes of things, who set his foot on fear and on
inexorable Fate, and far below him heard the roaring of the streams of
Hell! And happy he who knows the rural deities, Pan, and Sylvanus the
Old, and the sisterhood of the nymphs! Unmoved is he by the people's
favour, by the purple of kings, unmoved by all the perfidies of civil
war, by the Dacian marching down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of
the Roman state, and the Empire hurrying to its doom. He wasteth not his
heart in pity of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what
fruits the branches bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings
forth; he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the
records of the common weal"--does not read the newspapers, in fact.

The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the Empire,
the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them; like Virgil we
too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for some such careless
paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the Islands of the
Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us
most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so
weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is
wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style.

But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought, that
style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on telling