----"Cui turpe caput, cui plurima cervix," (iii. 52,) would not pass muster at any fair of the last century. The horses are better; there is the dash of high venture in them; they have snuffed battle; their limbs are suppled to a bounding gallop,--as where in the Æneid, "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum." The fourth book of the Georgics is full of the murmur of bees, showing how the poet had listened, and had loved to listen. After describing minutely how and where the homes of the honey-makers are to be placed, he offers them this delicate attention:-- "Then o'er the running stream or standing lake A passage for thy weary people make; With osier floats the standing water strew; Of massy stones make bridges, if it flow; That basking in the sun thy bees may lie, And, resting there, their flaggy pinions dry." DRYDEN. Who cannot see from this how tenderly the man had watched the buzzing yellow-jackets, as they circled and stooped in broad noon about some little pool in the rills that flow into the Lago di Garda? For hereabout, of a surety, the poet once sauntered through the noontides, while his flock cropped the "milk-giving cytisus," upon the hills. And charming hills they are, as my own eyes can witness: nay, my little note-book of travel shall itself tell the story. (The third shelf, upon the right, my boy.) No matter how many years ago,--I was going from Milan, (to which place I had come by Piacenza and Lodi,) on my way to Verona by Brescia and Peschiera. At Desenzano, or thereabout, the blue lake of Benaco first appeared. A few of the higher mountains that bounded the view were still capped with snow, though it was latter May. Through fragrant locusts and mulberry-trees, and between irregular hedges, we dashed down across the isthmus of Sermione, where the ruins of a Roman castle flout the sky. Hedges and orchards and fragrant locusts still hem the way, as we touch the lake, and, rounding its southern skirt, come in sight of the grim bastions of Peschiera. A Hungarian sentinel, lithe and tall, I see pacing the rampart, against the blue of the sky. Women and girls come trooping into the narrow road,--for it is near sunset,--with their aprons full of mulberry-leaves. A bugle sounds somewhere within the fortress, and the mellow music swims the water, and beats with melodious echo--boom on boom--against Sermione and the farther shores. The sun just dipping behind the western mountains, with a disk all golden, pours down a flood of yellow light, tinting the mulberry-orchards, the edges of the Roman castle, the edges of the waves where the lake stirs, and spreading out in a bay of gold where the lake lies still. Virgil never saw a prettier sight there; and I was thinking of him, and of my old master beating off spondees and dactyls with a red ruler on his threadbare knee, when the sun sunk utterly, and the purple shadows dipped us all in twilight.