The secret of the power of Lucretius as an interpreter of Nature lies in his recognition of the sublimity of natural law in ordinary phenomena. The secret of Virgil's power lies in the insight and long-practised meditation through which he abstracts the single element of beauty from common sights and the ordinary operations of industry. Thus, to take one or two instances of the way in which the charm of Nature is communicated to the drudgery of rural labour:--what a sense of refreshment to eye and ear is conveyed by the lines which describe the practical remedies by which the farmer mitigates the burning drought of summer:--
Et cum exustus ager morientibus aestuat herbis, Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam Elicit; illa cadens raucum per levia murmur Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(347).
Again, what a picture of rich woodland beauty is created out of the occurrence, in the midst of practical directions, of some homely traditional maxims, in accordance with which farmers judged of the probable abundance of their crop:--
Contemplator item, cum se nux plurima silvis Induet in florem et ramos curvabit olentis: Si superant fetus, pariter frumenta sequentur, Magnaque cum magno veniet tritura calore(348).
So too, in a technical account of the different varieties of soil, he brings before the mind, by a single descriptive touch, a picture of abundant harvest-fields,--
non ullo ex aequore cernes Plura domum tardis decedere plaustra iuvencis(349);
and enables us to feel the charm of a rich pastoral country,--with its lonely woodland glades, its brimming river flowing past mossy and grassy banks, and the shelter and shade of its caves and rocks, in the midst of homely directions for the care of mares before they foal:--
Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum Flumina, muscus ubi et viridissima gramine ripa, Speluncaeque tegant, et saxea procubet umbra(350).
In the inculcation of his practical precepts his aim is even more to exalt the dignity and to exhibit the delight of rural labour, than to explain its methods or inculcate its utility.
He imparts a peculiar vivacity, grace, and tenderness to his treatment of many topics by the analogy which he suggests between the life of Nature and of man. The perception of analogy originates in the philosophical and imaginative thought of Lucretius; and it is in the second Book, in the composition of which, as Mr. Munro has shown, Virgil's mind was saturated with the ideas, feelings, and language of his predecessor, that this element of poetical interest is most conspicuous. The following examples, occurring in the technical exposition of the growth and tending of trees, are all taken from the second Book; and two of them, those marked _g_ and _h_, are immediately suggested by Lucretius:--