Virgil

"Καὶ φίλος Αὐσονίοισι λιγύθροος ἔπρεπε κύκνος πνείων εὐεπίης Βεργίλλιος, ὅν ποτε Ῥώμης Θυμβριὰς ἄλλον Ὅμηρον ἀνέτρεφε πάτριος Ηχώ."

"Nempe apud Vergilium, quem propterea paruuli legunt, ut uidelicet poeta magnus omniumque praeclarissimus atque optimus teneris ebibitus animis non facile obliuione possit aboleri..."

"Divinus poeta noster."

"Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?"

"O de li altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.'Tu se' lo mio maestro e 'l mio autore, tu se' solo colui da cu' io tolsi lo bello stilo che m'ha fatto onore."

"O anima cortese mantoana Di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura, E durera quanto 'l moto lontana."

"Tu duca, tu signore e tu maestro."

"O gloria di Latin, disse, per cui mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra..."

"Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi di sé, Virgilio, dolcissimo patre, Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi."

"For thou shalt, by thyn owene experience, Konne in a chayer rede of this sentence Bet than Virgile, while he was on lyve."

"Quem te, inquit, reddidissem, Si te vivum invenissem, Poetarum maxime!"

"Nothing in short was omitted by that godlike man. Only fools would want to add anything; only insolent men to change anything. Sentences, numbers, figures, simplicity, candor, ornaments, nature, art, learning—all is incomparable, or, in a word—Virgilian. ... Let the cravens who contend that the free genius and taste of divine Virgil were prisoners of Homer's inventions hold their peace. It was not thus. The arguments of Homer which nature proposed to him were corrected by Virgil as a schoolboy's theme by his professor."

"...exemplum, regula, principium, finis esse debet nobis Maro."

"Homer's poems were writ from a free fury, an absolute and full soul; Virgil's out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatory spirit: not a simile he hath but is Homer's; not an invention, person, or disposition but is wholly or originally built upon Homerical foundations, and in many places hath the very words Homer useth."

"And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life, That it shall gather strength of life, with being, And live hereafter more admired than now."

"The chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known."

"Next, Virgil I’ll call forth To pledge this second health In wine, whose each cup’s worth An Indian commonwealth."

"Hail mighty Maro! may that sacred name Kindle my breast with thy celestial flame; Sublime ideas and apt words infuse, The Muse instruct my voice, and thou inspire the Muse!"

"I looked on Virgil as a succinct and grave majestic writer; one who weighed not only every thought, but every word and syllable."

"He seems to have studied not to be translated."

"There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty which gives so inexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation."

"Virgil had the gift of expressing much in little, and sometimes in silence..."

"Virgil is so exact in every word, that none can be changed but for a worse; nor any one removed from its place, but the harmony will be altered. He pretends sometimes to trip; but it is only to make you think him in danger of a fall, when he is most secure."

"[Homer's] Fire burns with extraordinary Heat and Vehemence … Virgil's is a clearer and a chaster Flame ..."

"Virgil has a thousand secret beauties..."

"Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only the advantage of writing first."

"Virgil, above all poets, had a stock, which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words."

"It long has been this sacred author's fate, To lie at ev'ry dull translator's will: Long, long his muse has groan'd beneath the weight Of mangling Ogleby's presumptuous quill."

"Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words."

"I came home a little later than usual the other night; and, not finding myself inclined to sleep, I took up Virgil, to divert me till I should be more disposed to rest. He is the author whom I always choose on such occasions; no one writing in so divine, so harmonious, nor so equal a strain, which leaves the mind composed and softened into an agreeable melancholy; the temper in which, of all others, I choose to close the day."

"When first young Maro in his boundless mind A work to outlast immortal Rome designed, Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law, And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw: But when to examine every part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design, And rules as strict his laboured work confine, As if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line."

"This fire is discerned in Virgil, but discerned as through a glass, reflected from Homer, more shining than fierce, but every where equal and constant."

"The delight of all ages, and the pattern of all poets."

"Virgil loved rural ease, and, far from harm, Maecenas fix'd him in a neat, snug farm, Where he might free from trouble pass his days In his own way, and pay his rent in praise."

"The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has, by making his hero both a traveller and a warrior, united the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey in one composition; yet his judgment was perhaps sometimes overborne by his avarice of the Homeric treasures; and, for fear of suffering a sparkling ornament to be lost, he has inserted it where it cannot shine with its original splendor."

"Savez-vous le latin, madame? Non; voilà pourquoi vous me demandez si j'aime mieux Pope que Virgile. Ah! madame, toutes nos langues modernes sont sèches, pauvres, et sans harmonie, en comparaison de celles qu'ont parlées nos premiers maîtres, les Grecs et les Romains. Nous ne sommes que des violons de village. Comment voulez-vous d’ailleurs que je compare des épîtres à un poëme épique, aux amours de Didon, à l'embrasement de Troie, à la descente d'Énée aux enfers? Je crois lEssai sur l'Homme, de Pope, le premier des poëmes didactiques, des poëmes philosophiques; mais ne mettons rien à côté de Virgile. Vous le connaissez par les traductions; mais les poëtes ne se traduisent point. Peut-on traduire de la musique? Je vous plains, madame, avec le goût et la sensibilité éclairée que vous avez, de ne pouvoir lire Virgile."

"I have this year read all Virgil through. I read a book of the Æneid every night, so it was done in twelve nights, and I had a great delight in it. The Georgicks did not give me so much pleasure, except the fourth book. The Eclogues I have almost all by heart."

"The principal and distinguishing excellency of Virgil, and which, in my opinion, he possesses beyond all poets, is tenderness. Nature had endowed him with exquisite sensibility; he felt every affecting circumstance in the scenes he describes; and, by a single stroke, he knows how to reach the heart."

"[The] pathetic is Virgil's great excellence in the Æneid, and...in that way he surpasses all other poets of every age and nation, except, perhaps (and only perhaps), Shakspeare. It is on that account that I rank him so very high; for surely to excel in that style which speaks to the heart is the greatest of all excellence."

"That harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow."

"Virgil's style is an inimitable mixture of the elaborately ornate, and the majestically plain and touching."

"Virgil seems to have copied Greek models completely, imitating them slavishly and lifelessly, and so they appear as plagiarisms more or less devoid of spirit."

"If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?"

"O Virgile! ô poète! ô mon maître divin!"

"It never occurs to me to place him among the Roman poets of the first order."

"Unless one is a moron, one always dies unsure of one's own value and that of one's works. Virgil himself, as he lay dying, wanted the Aeneid burned."

"Le poète de la latinité tout entière."

"Over the whole of the great poem of Virgil, over the whole Æneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy: not a rigid, a moody gloom, like the melancholy of Lucretius; no, a sweet, a touching sadness, but still a sadness; a melancholy which is at once a source of charm in the poem, and a testimony to its incompleteness. Virgil, as Niebuhr has well said, expressed no affected self-disparagement, but the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart, when he desired on his deathbed that his poem might be destroyed. A man of the most delicate genius, the most rich learning, but of weak health, of the most sensitive nature, in a great and overwhelming world; conscious, at heart, of his inadequacy for the thorough spiritual mastery of that world and its interpretation in a work of art; conscious of this inadequacy—the one inadequacy, the one weak place in the mighty Roman nature! This suffering, this graceful-minded, this finely-gifted man is the most beautiful, the most attractive figure in literary history; but he is not the adequate interpreter of the great period of Rome."

"He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tesselated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces. Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers who in every nation go by the name of Classics."

"Virgil imitated Homer, but imitated him as a rival, not as a disciple."