“Meanwhile, Æneas in a valley deep Sees a secluded grove, with rustling leaves And branches; there the river Lethe glides Past many a tranquil home; and round about Innumerable tribes and nations flit. As in the meadows in the summer-time The bees besiege the various flowers, and swarm About the snow-white lilies; and the field Is filled with murmurings soft.” The pathos, too, of his author—that exquisite pathos of Virgil which pervades the _Æneid_ like a perfume, which one feels not more in the eloquent compression of the _En Priamus_ wherewith Æneas recognizes his country’s painted woes on the walls of the Carthaginian temple, or the passionate heartbreak of the “O patria, o divûm domus, Ilium, et incluta bello Mœnia Dardanidum,” or the subtle, touching beauty of the epitaph on Æolus, scarcely to be read even now without a quiver of the eyelids: “Domus alta sub Ida, Lyrnessi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulcrum,” than in the “Vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta Jam sua,” of the farewell to Helenus, or the manly fortitude of the hero’s admonition to his son: “Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis” —the pathos of the _Æneid_ Prof. Conington has not been unsuccessful in preserving, as we might show in more quotations than we have room for. But for the expression of sublimity or intense emotion the octosyllabic verse is scarcely so apt; and in striving to do justice to the tragic grandeur of the second book, the passionate despair of the fourth, and the elevated majesty of the sixth, or even the splendid rhetoric of Juno and Turnus in the tenth and eleventh, Prof. Conington must often “have been made sensible,” as he says in his preface, “of the profound difference between the poetry of Scott and the poetry of Virgil.” In the battle-scenes, however, he takes his full revenge, and in his nimble-footed verse Turnus falls on with a fire and fury, or swift Camilla scours the plain with a grace and lightness, which most of his competitors toil after in vain. And in rendering those epigrammatic turns of phrase of which the _Æneid_ is full, and which are so characteristic a feature of Virgil’s style, we know of no version which surpasses his. Take such examples as these: “Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem”: “No safety can the vanquished find Till hope of safety be resigned”; “Mixtoque insania luctu Et furiis agitatus amor et conscia virtus”: “A warrior’s pride, a father’s pain, In mingled madness glow”; “Sed neque currentem se nec cognoscit euntem Tollentemve manu saxumque immane moventem” (how well in the heavy movement of the last line the sound echoes the sense!—a beauty which the translator certainly misses): “Running, he knew not that he ran: Nor, throwing, that he threw”; the description of Turnus’ horses in book xii.: