Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris-- ferro molirier arva-- magnos manibus divellere montes--
in the older poet first opened up this vein which was wrought with such effectual results by his successor. But Conington has, in his notes, drawn attention to another vein of feeling, which is all Virgil's own, and which enables him to give further variety and charm to these homely details. The husbandman has not only his hard and incessant struggle--'labor improbus'--but he has the delight of success, the joy of contemplating the new beauty and richness, created by the strength of his arm. This feeling breaks out in the 'Ecce' of the line already quoted,--
iuvat Ismara Baccho Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum(354);--
Iam canit effectos extremus vinitor antes(355).
Another set of associations, interwoven with the rich and firm texture of the poem, are those derived from earlier science and poetry. Of the resources of learned allusion Lucretius makes a singularly sparing use. The localising epithets and mythological names in which Virgil's poem abounds possessed no attraction for his austerer genius, nourished by the severe models of an older time, and rejecting the ornaments and distractions from the main interest familiar to Alexandrine literature. Virgil had already shown in the Eclogues this tendency to overlay his native thought with the spoils of Greek learning. Such phrases as 'Strymoniae grues,' 'Pelusiacae lentis,' 'Amyclaeum canem,' 'Idumaeas palmas,'--the references to the 'harvests of Mysia and Gargarus,' to the 'vines of Ismarus,' 'Cytorus, waving with boxwood,' etc. etc., must have been charged, for Virgil's contemporaries, in a way which they cannot be for a modern reader, with the memories of foreign travel or of residence in remote provinces, or with the interest attaching to lands recently made known. To us their chief interest is that by their strangeness they enhance the effect with which the more familiar names of Italian places are used. Thus the contrasted pictures of the illimitable pastures of Libya and of the wintry wastes of Scythia enable us to realise more exquisitely the charm of that fresh(356) Italian pastoral scene immediately preceding, the description of which combines the tender feeling of the Eclogues with the deeper realism of the Georgics. Thus too the great episode on the beauty and riches of Italy (ii. 136-176) is introduced in immediate contrast to the account of the prodigal luxuriance of Nature in the forests and jungles of the East. But even to a modern reader such expressions as these--