and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab
illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the
passionate longing of AEneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst
forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured
anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the
thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector
is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.

But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and
sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the
character of AEneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one
pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child,
like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over
the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia
tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the
AEneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of AEneas. Like the
poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and
the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from
those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright
fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the AEneid.
Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans,"
brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel
everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than
the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the
portrait of AEneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the
poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his
final triumph, AEneas

"incusat voce Latinum;
Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi."

Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation
is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero
asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples
who are destined to be one.

It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of AEneas, the
struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire
absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his
clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the
divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and
duty, which gives i