Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/121

Rh ; Italia, too, was a creative soil, but of government, empire, law. Her poetry, as it was less an impulse and more a purpose, belongs largely to the mixed class. In its most objective portions there is an air of authorship and self-expression. I will not speak now of Lucretius, who sends out the one dauntless ray of contemplative splendor between the Hebraic sages and the seers of our new dispensation. But Vergil is a typical example Vergil. of the poet whose style is so unmistakable that every verse overflows with personal quality,—a style that endures, establishes a pupilage. Vergil borrowed fire from Greece to light the altars of beauty in a ruder land. The Iliad and Odyssey kindled the invention and supplied the construction of his Æneids; the Georgics, his sturdiest cantos, took their motive from Hesiod; the Eclogues are a paraphrase upon Theocritus. But the Mantuan's style is preëminently his own,—the limpid, liquid, sweet, steadfast Vergilian intonation on which monarchs and statesmen hung enchanted, and which was confessedly the parent-voice of many an after bard. Tennyson, in point of a style whose quality His modern countertypes. is the more distinct for its diffusiveness,—whose potency, to borrow the homœopathic term, is the greater for its perfect trituration,—has been the English Vergil of our day. Browning's trade-mark is, plainly, the antithesis of what I here mean by style. Our own Longfellow furnishes the New World counterpart of Vergil. In the ascetic