Eclogues

"Alas! what boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade, And strictly meditate the thankles Muse, Were it not better don as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?"

"But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one Beginning with "Formosum Pastor Corydon.""

"[Virgil's] Eclogues are anything but a successful imitation of the idyls of Theocritus; they could not, in fact, be otherwise than unsuccessful: their object is to create something which could not prosper in a Roman soil. The shepherds of Theocritus are characters of ancient Sicilian poetry; I do not believe that they were taken from Greek poems. Daphnis, for example, is a Sicilian not a Greek hero. The idyls of Theocritus grew out of popular songs, and hence his poems have a genuineness, truth, and nationality. Now Virgil, in transplanting that kind of poetry to the plains of Lombardy, peoples that country with Greek shepherds, with their Greek names and Greek peculiarities,—in short, with beings that never could exist there."

"These poems of Virgil have always delighted me much; there is frequently either an elegance or a happiness which no translation can hope to equal."