The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road; and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of himself. The dexterous episode of Aristaeus, visited with a plague in his bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by ending consummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound tenderness,--the creating high and pure spirit of beauty--the outwardly watchful and sensitive eye and ear--with tones at will fetched by listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn, the sublime,--these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow motions and varying hues of the now visible mind--which on the stream of articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion changes, a power of music,--these all are surprisingly contained within the SEVENTY-FIVE VERSES which unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the twice-lost Eurydice. It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to die--_Moritura!_ then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her companions. "Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps, Immanem ante pedes hydrum _moritura_ puella Servantem ripas alta non vidit in herba." At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers! At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremos Implerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiae arces, Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus, Atque Getae, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.