294 VIRGIL AND HIS ‘“ BEES.” 
myself, I have never laughed at it. I know, I feel, that every word 
of this great sacred poet has a weighty value, an authority which 
I would designate as that of an augur and a pontiff. And the fourth 
book of the Georgics, particularly, was a holy work, issuing from the 
inmost recesses of the heart. It was a pious homage rendered to 
sorrow and to friendship; an eulogium on the proscribed Gallus, 
Virgil’s dearest friend. This eulogium, undoubtedly, was struck out 
by the prudent Meecenas; and Virgil then substituted his Resurrection 
of the Bees: a song full of immortality, which, in the mystery of 
Nature’s transformations, embodies our highest hope, that death is not 
a death, but the beginning of a new life. 
Would he have descended to the empty pleasure of inserting a 
popular fable in that consecrated portion of his poem which had been 
occupied by his friend’s name? I will never believe it. The fable, if 
it be one, must necessarily possess some serious foundation, and a 
truthful side. We are not dealing here with the worldly poet, the 
urbane singer, like Horace, the elegant favourite of Rome. It is not 
the charming improvisatore of the court of Augustus, the gay and in- 
discreet Ovid, who betrays:the loves of the gods. Virgil is the child of 
Earth, the pure and noble figure of the old Italian peasant, the religious 
interrogator, the reverently simple interpreter of the secrets of Nature. 
And, to propitiate his offended pride, 
A fatted calf and a black ewe provide : 
This finished, to the former woods repair. 
His mother’s precepts he performs with care ; 
The temple visits, and adores with prayer. 
Four altars raises, from his herds he calls, 
For slaughter, four the fairest of his bulls ; 
Four heifers from his female store he took, 
All fair, and all unknowing of the yoke. 
Nine mornings thence, with sacrifice and prayers, 
The powers atoned, he to the grove repairs. 
Behold a prodigy ! for, from within 
The broken bowels, and the bloated skin, 
A buzzing noise of bees his ears alarms, 
Straight issue through the sides assaulting swarms ; 
Dark as a cloud they make a wheeling flight, 
Then on a neighbouring tree, descending light : 
Like a large cluster of black grapes they show, 
And make a large dependence from the bough.” 
