Ebook The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil

"Thou that singest wheat and woodland,
Tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;
All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word;
Poet of the happy Tityrus
Piping underneath his beechen bowers;
Poet of the poet-satyr
Whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers."

Tennyson.

"Throughout the Middle Ages Virgil was a beneficent wizard, a romance-writer and a sorcerer, his name recurring strangely among all the greatest names of history or fable. To the scholarship of the Renaissance he became a poet again, but still Prince of poets, still with something of divine attributes. For us, who inherit from all these ages, he is the gathered sum of what to all these ages he has been. But it is as a voice of Nature that he now appeals to us most; as a voice of one who in his strength and sweetness is not too steadfastly felicitous to have sympathy with human weakness and pain. Through the imperial roll of his rhythm there rises a note of all but intolerable pathos; and in the most golden flow of his verse he still brings us near him by a faint accent of trouble.