The movement of Virgil's verse reminds us rather of his own river--
qui per saxa volutus Purior electro campum petit(432).
Occasionally we catch the sound of some more rapid rush and impetuous fall, as in the hurry and agitation and culminating grandeur of these lines--
Continuo, ventis surgentibus, aut freta ponti Incipiunt agitata tumescere, et aridus altis Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur(433);--
but generally the stream flows on, neither in rapid torrent nor with abrupt transitions, but 'with a tranquil deep strength,' fed by pure and abounding sources of affection, of contemplation, of moral and religious feeling, of delight from eye and ear, from memory and old poetic association.
THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL.
The distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. The two kinds of narrative poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they are also the products of very different national temperaments and faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are richest in literary epics--the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the English--are those which possess few or no native poems either of the type realised in the Nibelungen-Lied, the Song of Roland, and poems of that class, or of the type realised in the Iliad and Odyssey; nor is there, in connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race, that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those which produced the vast historical work of Livy and 'The Decline and Fall' of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the _naïveté_, the rapidity of conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece, that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of imagination in union with a clearness and sanity of judgment, which the most advanced eras of other literatures scarcely equal. Thus the two great Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the outward world in 'the first intention,'--man in the energy and buoyancy of the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,--they are at the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.