ondescending interest towards the
past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague
dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of
Rome.

From beginning to end the AEneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel
ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness
which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus
in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when
the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide
peace of the world beneath its sway. But the AEneid is no mere outburst
of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end
and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to
be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career
as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine
prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to
do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing
clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in
welding the nations into a new human race. The AEneid is a song of the
future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of
duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work
which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the
future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task
shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose
had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who
by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.

It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the AEneid. Filled
as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems
constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the
toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his
national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem
draws both these impressions together in the figure of AEneas. AEneas is
the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his
destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the
hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the
Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the
self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is
by his mouth that in the darkes