[Cease] to look threatful, or from wells cease blood
To flow, and lofty cities through the night
To ring again at howling of the wolves.
At no time else from heaven unclouded fell
More flashes, nor so oft dread comets blazed.
Therefore a second time Philippi saw
The Roman ranks in mutual fight engage
With brother arms; nor was it undeserved

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!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,-
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue ;-
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury, and fierce civil strife,
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of wa;
All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds:
And Cæsar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Até by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch's voice,
Cry, "Havock!" and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth,
With carrion men groaning for burial."

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 light, or with his weighty harrows strike
On morions empty, and at giant bones

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
To aid do ye forbid not! We enough
Long since are expiating by our blood
The perjuries of Laomedontian Troy.
Long since to us the palace of the sky
Doth thee, O Cæsar, grudge, and it complains
That thou for mortals' triumphs art concerned:—
Seeing with them are right and wrong transformed;

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;
So numerous the phases [be] of crimes;
Not any worthy honour to the plough;
Waste lie the tilths, the tillers drafted off,
And bending sickles into the stiff sword
Are forged. Euphrates hence, Germania thence,
Stirs war; the covenants between them burst,
The cities that be neighbours carry arms;
Fumeth ungodly Mars throughout the sphere:
As when from out the barriers four-horse cars
Have flung them, spring they on the courses, and in vain
Straining the thongs, is hurried by his steeds.
The charioteer, nor heeds the car the reins.

690

Line 685. Pope finely describes the evils of tyranny:
"The fields are ravish'd from the industrious swains,
From men their cities, and from gods their fanes :
The levelled towns with weeds lie covered o'er;
The hollow winds through naked temples roar ;
Round broken columns clasping ivy twined;
O'er heaps of ruin stalk'd the stately hind;
The fox obscene to gaping tombs retires,
And savage howlings fill the sacred quires."

Windsor Forest.

BOOK II.

THUS far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven:
Now thee, O Bacchus, will I chant, and eke
Along with thee the saplings of the wood,
And offspring of slow-growing olive-tree.
Hither, O thou Lenæan father!-here

With gifts of thine are all things full; for thee,
With vine-leafed autumn laden, blooms the field,
Foameth the vintage with its brimming vats ;-
Hither, O thou Lenæan father, come,
And thy uncovered legs, their buskins doffed,
In the fresh must along with me distain.

First, nature is diverse in bearing trees.
For some, none of mankind employing force,
Do of themselves of their free motion come,
And plains and winding rivers widely fill;—
The downy willow and the lither brooms,
The poplar, and, with leaf of bluish green,
Hoar sallow groves. But some from shed seed rise,
As towering chestnuts, and the Æsculus,

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
The monarch of the glades, the Esculus.

Perhaps nemus here should be taken in its secondary sense,
lated "trees" or "woods."

and trans

And oaks, esteemed by Graii oracles.
There sprouteth up in others from the root
The closest thicket, as from cherry-trees
And elms; eke [too] doth the Parnassian bay,
Tiny beneath a parent's giant shade,
Uprear itself. These methods nature first
Vouchsafed; by these doth flourish every kind
Of forests, and of shrubs, and holy groves.

Others there are, which hath experience' self
Along its pathway for itself found out.
One, suckers from the parents' tender frame
Splitting away, hath them in furrows laid;
Another plunges settings in the field,
And stakes cleft into four [at foot], and poles
With pointed timber; and of forest-trees
Some do the layer's bended arches wait,
And living nurseries in their native soil:

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,
Are answers sought, and destinies foretold:
Propitious oracles are begg'd with vows,

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.