The words might represent a fancy, or a dogma of the schools and many no doubt so read them, because they had no {30} experience to help them. But to others it is clear that the passage is one of the deepest import, for it is the key to Virgil's mind and the thought is an expression of what we can call by no other name than religion. Around him men and women were seeking communion with gods; he had had communion with what he could not name--he had experienced religion in a very deep, abiding and true way. There is nothing for it--at least for Englishmen--but to quote the "lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"-- I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Virgil's experience did not stop here; like Wordsworth, he found Nature's self By all varieties of human love Assisted. He had been a son and a brother; and such relations of men to men impressed him--they took him into the deepest and most beautiful regions of life; and one of the charms of Italy was that it was written all over with the records of human love and helpfulness. The clearing, the orchard, the hilltop town, the bed of flowers, all spoke to him "words that could not be uttered." His long acquaintance with such scripts brought it about that he found in man an object of delight, Of pure imagination and of love-- and he came to the Roman people with a deep impression of human worth--something unknown altogether in Roman poetry before or after. Lucretius was impressed with man's insignificance in the universe; Horace, with man's folly. Virgil's {31} poetry throbbed with the sense of man's grandeur and his sanctity.