no THE BIEDS OF VIRGIL. 



at Tarentum also he is found, probably visiting the friendly 

 and jovial Horace. The hill-country of the peninsula, and 

 of the island that belongs to it, became a part of his poetical 

 soul ; and as he probably spent much of his time at his own 

 Cisalpine farm, after he was restored to it by his patron's kindly 

 influence, he must have been constantly moving among all 

 the phases of Italian landscape — in the plain, on the hills, 

 by the sea. 



Everything, then, in Virgil's history, shows him a genuine 

 poet of the country, and at the same time no one who really 

 knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the evidence 

 of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on other poets, 

 and could, not disengage himself from the antecedents of his 

 art. From Homer, Hesiod, Aratus, or Theocritus, for example, 

 come nearly all the passages in his works in which birds are 

 mentioned. But though they descend from these poets, and 

 bear the features of their ancestors, they are yet a new and 

 living generation, not lifeless copies modelled by a mere 

 imitator; and their beauty and their truth is not that of 

 Greek, but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the transla- 

 tions of Aratus by other Koman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and 

 Germanicus, with Virgil's first Georgic, and he will not fail to 

 mark the difference between the mere translator and the poet 

 who breathes into the work of his predecessors a new life and 

 an immortal one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of 

 Virgil's poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any 

 other animals, which is untrue to fact as we know it from 

 Italian naturalists. Here and there, of course, there are 



