Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/122

92 and prosaic America of his early days he excited a feeling for the beautiful, borrowing over sea and from all lands the romance-forms that charmed his countrymen and guided them to taste and invention. His originality lay in the specific tone that made whatever Longfellow's sweet verse rehearsed a new song, and in this wise his own. Mentioning these leaders of to-day only to strengthen my reference to Vergil,—and as illustrating Schlegel's point that "what we borrow from others, to assume a true poetical shape, must be born again within us,"—I Ovid, Catullus, etc. may add that there is a good deal of personal feeling and expression in the Latin epigrammatists and lyrists. We have Ovid with his Tristia of exile, and Catullus with his Sapphic grace and glow, and a Latin anthology of which the tenderest numbers are eloquent of grief for lover and friend gone down to the nebulous pagan underworld. The deaths that touched them most were those of the young and dear, cut off with their lives unlived, their promise of grace and glory brought to naught. Both the Greeks and the Latins, in their joy of life, strongly felt the pathos of this earthly infruition. That famous touch of Vergil's, in the A touch of nature. sixth Æneid, was not all artifice: the passage in which Æneas sees a throng of shades awaiting their draught of Lethe and reincarnation in the upper world,—and among them the beauteous youthful spirit that in time will become Marcellus, son of the Emperor's sister Octavia,