No man can read the _AEneid_ without seeing that it has been constructed, both in its general conception and chief incidents, on the poems of Homer; and yet so exquisite was the taste, so refined the sentiment, so tender the heart of VIRGIL, that he has produced upon the world the impression of a great original author. Dante worshipped him as a species of divinity; he made him his guide through the infernal regions, to unfold the crimes of the wicked and the intentions of the Deity in the distribution of future rewards and punishments. Throughout the middle ages he was regarded as a sort of necromancer, a mighty magician, to whom the past and the future are alike known, and whose power even the elements of nature were constrained to obey. The "Sortes Virgilianae," so well known, and so long practised in every country of Europe, arose from this belief. The imagery, mythology and characters of his epic poem are drawn from the _Iliad_: but in two particulars he is entirely original, and his genius has opened the two fountains from which the most prolific streams of beauty in modern poetry have flowed. He is the father of _descriptive_ and _amatory_ poetry. The passion of love, as we understand it, was unknown to Homer, as much as was the description of nature as a separate and substantive object. He has made the whole _Iliad_, indeed, turn upon the wrath of Achilles for the loss of Briseis; and he has painted, with inimitable tenderness and pathos, the conjugal attachment of Hector and Andromache; but he had no conception of love as a passion, mingled with sentiment, and independent of possession. The wrath of Achilles is the fury of an Eastern sultan whose harem has been violated: the parting of Hector and Andromache is the rending asunder of the _domestic_ affections, the farewell from the family hearth, the breaking up of the home circle. But the love of Dido for AEneas is the refined passion which is the soul of the romances and of half the poetry of modern times. It was the creature of the imagination, the offspring of the soul from its own conceptions, kindled only into life by an external object. It arose from mental admiration; it was inhaled more by the ear than the eye; it was warmed at his recital of the sack of Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. It had no resemblance to the seducing voluptuousness of Ovid, any more than the elegant indecencies of Catullus. It resembled the passion of Desdemona for Othello.