[Cease] to look threatful, or from wells cease blood 660 'Fore heavenly powers, that twice should batten with our blood Emathia and Hamus' spacious plains. Ay too the time will come when in those bourns The farmer, working earth with his bent plough, Line 660. "Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood! That mothers shall but smile when they behold Mark Antony's Soliloquy over Cæsar's Corpse: J. C. iii. 1. 666. Perhaps it may be necessary to remark on molitus, v. 494, that it has been rendered "working," although a past participle. This proceeds upon the assumption that Virgil here has followed the principle, so common with the poets, of using the past participle of deponent verbs in a present sense, though they have a participle present. The reason of the license may be seen in Wagner, Quas. Virg. xxix. 3. In the present instance it is plain that it is during the act of working On javelins gnawed away with rugged rust Shall marvel, in their sepulchres unearthed. Gods of my native land, Indigetes, And Romulus, and mother Vesta, who The Tuscan Tiber and Rome's palaces Dost ward, this youth at least our ruined age 670 680 the earth that the ploughman makes his strange discovery. Forbiger, indeed, observes that, strictly speaking, it is after the operation that the wonder appears; but perhaps it is truer to say that the operation and the wonder are contemporaneous. The past sense would seem to separate the one from the other by too wide an interval. However, if the reader please, he can alter the passage thus: The swain, when earth he has worked with his bent plough: but, I confess, it seems to me to be very stiff. Line 670. The same wonder is excited, according to Collins, by an opposite cause. Speaking of one of the Hebrides, he says: "To that hoar pile, which still its ruins shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground." Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands. 676. The English idiom seems to demand "have expiated." Dry-, den makes the tears of England equally effective in a graver case: "So tears of joy, for your returning spilt, Work out and expiate our former guilt." Astraa Redux, 274, 5. So many battles [rage] throughout the globe; 690 Line 685. Pope finely describes the evils of tyranny: Windsor Forest. BOOK II. THUS far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven: With gifts of thine are all things full; for thee, First, nature is diverse in bearing trees. Which leafs for Jove the monarch of the glades, 10 20 Line 19. If, in rendering v. 15, the awkwardness of hearing a long relative clause before the antecedent be thought a less evil than displacing the latter, the passage may be turned in some such way as this: As towering chestnuts, and, which leafs for Jove Perhaps nemus here should be taken in its secondary sense, and trans And oaks, esteemed by Graii oracles. Others there are, which hath experience' self 30 No root need others, and the topmost shoot The pruner scruples not, restoring it, To earth to trust. Nay e'en, the trunks cut up, 40 O marvellous to be told!-there is forced out Line 21. Dryden takes an ingenious advantage of the legend in his Panegyrick of Charles II. 129: "Thus, from your royal oak, like Jove's of old, And crowns that grow upon the sacred boughs." 31. In v. 23 Manso reads teneras instead of tenero, on slender manuscript authority. Virgil perhaps consulted the sound somewhat t the prejudice of the sense, thinking that the ear would be more offended by the close proximity of such definite syllables as as, than the mind would be by the transference of tenderness from the offspring to the mother. Perhaps, too, he thought that the unmerciful tearing of suckers from her frame might reduce her to a condition which, in poetry at least, might warrant the soft epithet. |