as
much as was the description of nature as a separate and substantive
object. He has made the whole _Iliad_, indeed, turn upon the wrath of
Achilles for the loss of Briseis; and he has painted, with inimitable
tenderness and pathos, the conjugal attachment of Hector and Andromache;
but he had no conception of love as a passion, mingled with sentiment, and
independent of possession. The wrath of Achilles is the fury of an Eastern
sultan whose harem has been violated: the parting of Hector and Andromache
is the rending asunder of the _domestic_ affections, the farewell from the
family hearth, the breaking up of the home circle. But the love of Dido
for AEneas is the refined passion which is the soul of the romances and of
half the poetry of modern times. It was the creature of the imagination,
the offspring of the soul from its own conceptions, kindled only into life
by an external object. It arose from mental admiration; it was inhaled
more by the ear than the eye; it was warmed at his recital of the sack of
Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. It had no
resemblance to the seducing voluptuousness of Ovid, any more than the
elegant indecencies of Catullus. It resembled the passion of Desdemona for
Othello.

Homer painted with graphic fidelity and incomparable force, often with
extraordinary beauty, the appearances of nature; but it was as
illustrations, or for the purpose of similitude only, that he did so. It
was on human events that his thoughts were fixed: it was the human heart,
in all its various forms and changes, that he sought to depict. But Virgil
was the high-priest of nature, and he worshipped her with all a poet's
fervour. He identifies himself with rural life, he describes with devout
enthusiasm its joys, its occupations, its hardships: the rocks, the woods,
the streams, awaken his ardent admiration; the animals and insects are the
objects of his tender solicitude. When the Mantuan bard wrote,

----"Saepe exiguus mus
Sub terram posuit domos atque horrea fecit,"

he was inspired with the same spirit that afterwards animated Burns when
he contemplated the daisy, Cowper when he sympathized with the hare. The
descriptive poetry of modern times has owed much to his exquisite eye and
sensitive heart. Thomson, in his _Seasons_, has expanded the theme in a
kindred spirit, and with prodigal magnificence. Scott and Byron have
brought that branch of the poetic art to the highest p