romance. The honey-sweet of the
lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8] steals subtly on the
graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of
pity, of fancy, of reverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal
close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of
love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely
since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she
showers her questions as one that could never know enough.

"Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."

Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his
look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychaeus
seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very
queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero
before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the
figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war
from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers
round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the
jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.

But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the
poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like
"misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe
to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of
the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling
in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the
soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony.
She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change
in AEneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of
her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve.
All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman
scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of AEneas as the
storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter
and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her
through the streets like a Maenad in the nightly orgies of Cithaeron; she
flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out
distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet
ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old