expressing in exquisite language the half-tones and delicate shades of
mental processes. The famous simile in the twelfth _Aeneid_--

_Ac velut in somnis oculos ubi languida pressit
Nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
Velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri
Succidimus, nec lingua valet, nec corpore notae
Sufficiunt vires aut vox et verba sequuntur--_

is an instance of the amazing mastery with which he makes language have
the effect of music in expressing the subtlest processes of feeling.
But the specific and central charm of Virgil lies deeper than in any
merely technical quality. The word which expresses it most nearly is that
of pity. In the most famous of his single lines he speaks of the "tears
of things;" just this sense of tears, this voice that always, in its most
sustained splendour and in its most ordinary cadences, vibrates with a
strange pathos, is what finally places him alone among artists. This
thrill in the voice, _come colui che piange e dice,_ is never absent from
his poetry. In the "lonely words," in the "pathetic half-lines" spoken of
by the two great modern masters of English prose and verse, he
perpetually touches the deepest springs of feeling; in these it is that
he sounds, as no other poet has done, the depths of beauty and sorrow, of
patience and magnanimity, of honour in life and hope beyond death.

A certain number of minor poems have come down to us associated more or
less doubtfully with Virgil's name. Three of these are pieces in
hexameter verse, belonging broadly to the class of the _epyllion,_ or
"little epic," which was invented as a convenient term to include short
poems in the epic metre that were not definitely pastorals either in
subject or treatment, and which the Alexandrian poets, headed by