Qui fuerant autem praesto, contagibus ibant Atque labore, pudor quem tum cogebat obire Blandaque lassorum vox mixta voce querellae. Optimus hoc leti genus ergo quisque subibat(375)--
in which the sincerity of the older master still asserts itself. There is great beauty however of pastoral scene, of pathos and human sympathy, of ethical contrast between the simple wants of the lower animals and the artificial luxury of human life, in Virgil's description. In the lines 520-522 one of those scenes in which he most delighted is brought before the imagination:--
Non umbrae altorum nemorum, non mollia possunt Prata movere animum, non qui per saxa volutus Purior electro campum petit amnis(376).
The last element in the picture suggests at once the 'Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles' of the Eclogues, and the lines earlier in the book--
Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum Flumina.
And the whole feeling of the passage is in harmony with that in Lucretius, ii. 361:--
Nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes Fluminaque illa queunt summis labentia ripis Oblectare animum, sumptamque avertere curam(377).
And in thorough harmony both with the pathos and the ethical feeling in Lucretius are the following:--
it tristis arator, Maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum(378):
Quid labor aut benefacta iuvant? quid vomere terras Invertisse gravis? atqui non Massica Bacchi Munera, non illis epulae nocuere repostae: Frondibus et victu pascuntur simplicis herbae, Pocula sunt fontes liquidi atque exercita cursu Flumina, nec somnos abrumpit cura salubris(379).
If the space assigned to the different episodes is to be regarded as the measure of their importance, the long episode at the end of the fourth Book, from line 315 to 558, would have to be regarded as of nearly equal value to all the others put together. And yet, notwithstanding the metrical beauty of the passage, it must be difficult for any one who is penetrated by the pervading sentiment of the Georgics to reach this point in the poem without a strong feeling of regret that the jealousy of Augustus had interfered with its original conclusion. As a Greek fable, composed after some Alexandrine model, mainly concerned with the fortunes of Orpheus and Eurydice,--for the shepherd Aristaeus, the