n, it seems,
after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in the
hope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas,
you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful days
returned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them--so
one may surmise from a number of memoranda--with a new meaning he began to
discover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of the _AEneid_
became a symbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the last
bewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to his
destruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses from
those books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not a
touch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?--

There the meaning of the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was
before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the
_loetas segetes_ seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes
about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills,
and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep
slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I
used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I
would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the
crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped
heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but
laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a
horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath
them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed
to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise
the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the
fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the
poet:

_Flumina amem silvasque inglorius_,

and his pathetic envy of those

Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew
The wonders of their state!

And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself,
still I was in Virgil's haunted world. Some distance from the house
was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a
row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit
through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees retu