But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the character of Æneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child, like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the Æneid. Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans," brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the portrait of Æneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his final triumph, Æneas "incusat voce Latinum; Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi." Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples who are destined to be one.