How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s funereal wail:—
Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret; Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.
(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.)
Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of Pindar’s Elysium in _Tiresias_, the sentiment pervading _The Lotos Eaters_ transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in _Œnone_ so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus. Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched by touches from original observation, as here in _The Princess_:—
As one that climbs a peak to gaze O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore. ... And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn Expunge the world,
which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἴδε νέφος αἰπολος ἀνήρ ἐρχόμενον κατὰ πόντον ὑπὸ Ζεφύροιο ἰωῆς τῷ δε τ’ ἄνευθεν ἐόντι, μελάντερον ἠΰτε πίσσα, φαίνετ’ ἰὸν κατὰ πόντον, ἄγει δέ τε λαῖλαπα πολλὴν.
(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across the deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep, bringing with it a great whirlwind.)
So again the fine simile in _Elaine_, beginning
Bare as a wild wave in the wide North Sea,
is at least modelled on the simile in _Iliad_, xv., 381-4, with reminiscences of the same similes in _Iliad_, xv., 624, and _Iliad_, iv., 42-56. The simile in the first section of the _Princess_,
As when a field of corn Bows all its ears before the roaring East,