Hedges and orchards and fragrant locusts still hem the way, as we touch the lake, and, rounding its southern skirt, come in sight of the grim bastions of Peschiera. A Hungarian sentinel, lithe and tall, I see pacing the rampart, against the blue of the sky. Women and girls come trooping into the narrow road,--for it is near sunset,--with their aprons full of mulberry-leaves. A bugle sounds somewhere within the fortress, and the mellow music swims the water, and beats with melodious echo--boom on boom--against Sermione and the farther shores.
The sun just dipping behind the western mountains, with a disk all golden, pours down a flood of yellow light, tinting the mulberry-orchards, the edges of the Roman castle, the edges of the waves where the lake stirs, and spreading out in a bay of gold where the lake lies still.
Virgil never saw a prettier sight there; and I was thinking of him, and of my old master beating off spondees and dactyls with a red ruler on his threadbare knee, when the sun sunk utterly, and the purple shadows dipped us all in twilight.
"_È arrivato, Signore!_" said the _vetturino_. True enough, I was at the door of the inn of Peschiera, and snuffed the stew of an Italian supper.
Virgil closes the first book of the Georgics with a poetic forecast of the time when ploughmen should touch upon rusted war-weapons in their work, and turn out helmets empty, and bones of dead soldiers,--as indeed they might, and did. But how unlike a poem it will sound, when the schools are opened on the Rappahannock again, and the boy scans,--choking down his sobs,--
"Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris,"
I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican success, and became more than ever an adulator of the ruling powers. I can fancy him at a palace tea-drinking, where pretty court-lips give some witty turn to his "_Sic Vos, non Vobis_," and pretty court-eyes glance tenderly at Master Marius, who blushes, and asks some Sabina (not Poppæa) after Tibullus and his Delia. But a great deal is to be forgiven to a man who can turn compliments as Virgil turned them. What can be more exquisite than that allusion to the dead boy Marcellus, in the Sixth Book of the Æneid? He is reading it aloud before Augustus, at Rome. Mæcenas is there from his tall house upon the Esquiline; possibly Horace has driven over from the Sabine country,--for, alone of poets, he was jolly enough to listen to the reading of a poem not his own. Above all, the calm-faced Octavia, Cæsar's sister, and the rival of Cleopatra, is present. A sad match she has made of it with Antony; and her boy Marcellus is just now dead,--dying down at Baiæ, notwithstanding the care of that famous doctor, Antonius Musa, first of hydropaths.