an. Man remained, the sad stern
manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of
AEneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that
drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine
order. Man was greater than his fate:--

"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,
Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."

There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which AEneas
addresses himself to his final combat:--

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis."

But the "dis aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most
just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to
fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of
harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat
their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take
life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil
carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that
flings its sad grace over the verse of the AEneid. We close it as we
close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman
stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism
of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than
the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the
mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of
his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the
greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of AEneas, but
his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark
boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of AEneas becomes Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "Dextrae se parvus Iulus
Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis."

"His steps scarce matching with my stride."

Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the
Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.

[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari,
Quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus arvis."

[4] "Quibus Hector ab oris
Expectate venis?"

[5] "Cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"

[6] "O sola infandos Trojae miserata labores."

[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."