ho have found a refuge and a new
Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the
very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but
again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of
Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the
light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. AEneas
is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that
has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man.

"Italiam magnam Grynaeus Apollo,
Italiam Lyciae jussere capessere sortes.
Hic amor, haec patria est!"

It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we
find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being
the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study
of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic
protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that
incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly
with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the
face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and
peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a
Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with
pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of
passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy
in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine
law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which
link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
reverence, of "piety."

It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of
its hero. AEneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same
absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the
same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline
and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the
poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so
Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of
AEneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old
world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there:
courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship,
family affection, faith to p