And widespread seas, and the blue vault of heaven! How all things joy to greet the rising Age! If but my span of life be stretched to see Thy birth, and breath remain to sing thy praise, Not Thracian Orpheus should o’ermatch my strain, Nor Linus,--though each parent helped the son, Phœbus Apollo and the Muse of Song: Though in Arcadia Pan my rival stood, His own Arcadia should pronounce for me. How soon, fair infant, shall thy first smile greet Thy happy mother, when the slow months crown The heart-sick hopes that waited for thy birth? Smile then, O Babe! so shall she smile on thee; The child on whom no parent’s smile hath beamed, No god shall entertain, nor goddess love.” It would be out of place here to discuss the various conjectures of the learned as to who the Child was, to whose birth the poet thus looks forward. Whether it was a son of the Consul Pollio himself, who died in his infancy; or the expected offspring of Augustus’s marriage with Scribonia, which was, after all, a daughter--Julia--whose profligate life and unhappy death were a sad contradiction of Virgil’s anticipations; or a child of Octavia, sister of Augustus;--which of these it was, or whether it was any one of them, neither ancient nor modern commentators have been able to decide. “It is not certain,” says Mr. Conington, “that the child ever was born; it is certain that, if born, he did not become the regenerator of his time.” It is possible, too, that the whole form of the poem may be strictly imaginary--that the child had been born already, long ago, and that it was no other than Octavianus Cæsar--and that Virgil does but use here the licence of poetry to express his hopes of a golden age that might follow the peace of Brundusium. And as to how far this very remarkable poem may or may not be regarded as one of what Archbishop Trench has called “the unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” would be to open a field of inquiry of the highest interest indeed, but far too wide for these pages. Yet it cannot be entirely passed over. The Sibylline oracles, to which Virgil alludes in his opening lines, whatever their original form, were so garbled and interpolated, both in Christian and pre-Christian times, that it is impossible now to know what they did or did not contain. But they were recognised, in the early Church--by the Emperor Constantine, who is said to have attributed his own conversion in great part to their study, and by St. Augustine, amongst others--as containing distinct prophecies of the Messiah. The recognition of the Roman Sibyl or Sibyls as bearing their testimony to the truth of Christianity is still familiar to us in the ancient hymn, “Dies Iræ,”--so often translated-- “Teste David cum Sibylla;”