great Poets are in this view powerful Religionists."

In 1815 Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, "Laodamia is a very original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation." (The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. p. 284.)

Mr. Hazlitt wrote of Laodamia: "It breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity—the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of Death. Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring—the texture of the thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble. It is a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to it."

I am indebted to the Headmaster of Fettes College, Edinburgh, the Rev. W. A. Heard, for the following illustrative notes on Laodamia:—

"This poem illustrates more completely than any other the sympathy of the poet with the spirit of antiquity in its purest and most exalted forms. The idea that underlies the poem is the same conception of 'pietas' which Virgil has embodied in the Æneid, and with which he has associated, especially in the sixth book, which Wordsworth in many passages recalls, great ethical and religious conceptions, derived in the main from the philosophy of Plato. 'Pietas' embraces all the duties of life that are based upon the affections—love of home and parents and children, love of the Gods of our Fathers, and a reverence for that great order of things in which man finds himself a part. The pious man believes in a destiny, or order transcending his own will: to exalt any passion, however innocent, above this, is a rebellion; to intensify any passion, so as to disturb the appropriate calm of resignation, is to act irreverently against the gods. Lesser duties must give way to greater: love of wife must give way to love of country, and the sorrow of bereavement must not obscure the larger issues of life. Thus, not only did Laodamia's yearning for the restoration of her husband to life show a failure to recognise the fixity of eternal laws, but her death was 'ὑπὲρ μόρον' and in reason's spite; it was, after all, self-will, and could not win the favour of heaven.

Blending with this notion of 'pietas,' we find the Platonic repudiation of sensuous and material life. This life is only a discipline under imperfect conditions, and to be set free from the passion and fretfulness of existence is the choice and longing of the wise.

The poem is thus notable, not so much for the assimilation of details, as for natural affinity to the spirituality of antiquity, of which Virgil is the purest exponent. Virgil's seriousness, his tenderness, his conception of the inevitable, and yet moral, order of the world, his desire for purification, his sadness, and yet complete freedom from unmanliness, his love of nature and belief in the sympathy of nature with man—all these are points of contact between the ancient and modern poet.