_Ac velut in somnis oculos ubi languida pressit Nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus Velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri Succidimus, nec lingua valet, nec corpore notae Sufficiunt vires aut vox et verba sequuntur--_
is an instance of the amazing mastery with which he makes language have the effect of music in expressing the subtlest processes of feeling. But the specific and central charm of Virgil lies deeper than in any merely technical quality. The word which expresses it most nearly is that of pity. In the most famous of his single lines he speaks of the "tears of things;" just this sense of tears, this voice that always, in its most sustained splendour and in its most ordinary cadences, vibrates with a strange pathos, is what finally places him alone among artists. This thrill in the voice, _come colui che piange e dice,_ is never absent from his poetry. In the "lonely words," in the "pathetic half-lines" spoken of by the two great modern masters of English prose and verse, he perpetually touches the deepest springs of feeling; in these it is that he sounds, as no other poet has done, the depths of beauty and sorrow, of patience and magnanimity, of honour in life and hope beyond death.
A certain number of minor poems have come down to us associated more or less doubtfully with Virgil's name. Three of these are pieces in hexameter verse, belonging broadly to the class of the _epyllion,_ or "little epic," which was invented as a convenient term to include short poems in the epic metre that were not definitely pastorals either in subject or treatment, and which the Alexandrian poets, headed by Theocritus, had cultivated with much assiduity and considerable success. The most important of them, the _Culex,_ or _Gnat,_ is a poem of about four hundred lines, in which the incident of a gnat saving the life of a sleeping shepherd from a serpent, and being crushed to death in the act, is made the occasion for an elaborate description of the infernal regions, from which the ghost of the insect rises to reproach his unconscious murderer. That Virgil wrote a poem with this title is alluded to by Martial and Statius as matter of common undisputed knowledge; nor is there any certain argument against the Virgilian authorship of the extant poem, but various delicate metrical considerations incline recent critics to the belief that it is from the hand of an almost contemporary imitator who had caught the Virgilian manner with great accuracy. The _Ciris,_ another piece of somewhat greater length, on the story of Scylla and Nisus, is more certainly the production of some forgotten poet belonging to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla, and is of interest as showing the immense pains taken in the later Augustan age to continue the Virgilian tradition. The third poem, the Moretum, is at once briefer and slighter in structure and more masterly in form. It is said to be a close copy of a Greek original by Parthenius of Nicaea, a distinguished man of letters of this period who taught Virgil Greek; nor is there any grave improbability in supposing that the _Moretum_ is really one of the early exercises in verse over which Virgil must have spent years of his laborious apprenticeship, saved by some accident from the fate to which his own rigorous judgment condemned the rest.