Who can hear Wordsworth describe how a poet on the island in
Grasmere
At noon
Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep,
Panting beneath the burthen of their wool
Lie round him, even as if they were a part
Of his own household:--
and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's
Stant et oves circum; nostri nee poenitet illas--
and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the
lovelorn Gallus' woe?
So again the well-known lines--
Not seldom, clad in radiant vest,
Deceitfully goes forth the Morn;
Not seldom Evening in the west
Sinks smilingly forsworn,--
are almost a translation of Palinurus' remonstrance with "the
treachery of tranquil heaven." And when the poet wishes for any link
which could bind him closer to the Highland maiden who has flitted
across his path as a being of a different world from his own:--
Thine elder Brother would I be,
Thy Father, anything to thee!--
we hear the echo of the sadder plaint--
Atque utinam e vobis unus--
when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the simple life
of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their undistracted joy.
Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which we read in
Wordsworth's poem on Ossian the following lines:--
Musaeus, stationed with his lyre
Supreme among the Elysian quire,
Is, for the dwellers upon earth,
Mute as a lark ere morning's birth,
and perceive that he who wrote them has entered--where no
commentator could conduct him--into the solemn pathos of Virgil's
_Musaeum ante omnis_--; where the singer whose very existence upon
earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the
underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.
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