The Iliad was being explained to us in class,—no doubt I would have loved it, but our master had made it odious by his analysis, his difficult tasks and his parrot-like recitals;—but suddenly I stopped, filled with admiration of a famous line, whose end is musical as the murmur of the waves of the incoming tide as they spread their sheets of foam upon the pebbly shore.
“Observe,” said the Big Ape, “observe the inceptive harmony.”
Zounds! Yes, I had observed it. Little need to take the trouble to point out such a sentence to me.
I also had a great admiration, less justified perhaps, for some lines from Virgil.
Since the beginning of the Ecloque I had, with the greatest interest, followed the two shepherds as they made their way across the fields of ancient Rome. I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I discovered in this description of a past time.
Onward went the two shepherds, and suddenly, they perceived that their journey was half over, “because the tomb of Bianor was immediately below them . . .” Oh! how vividly I saw that tomb of Bianor disclose itself to their view. Its old stones, that made a white blot on the reddish road, were covered with tiny sun-scorched plants, wild thyme or marjoram, and here and there grew stunted dark foliaged shrubs. And the sonority of the word Bianoris with which the sentence ended suddenly and magically evoked for me the musical humming of the insects that buzzed around the two travellers who, upon that bygone day in June, walked onward in the great silence and serene tranquillity of the hot noon enkindled by a younger sun. I was no longer in the schoolroom; I was in the meadows with the shepherds walking with them this radiant summer day through the sun-scorched flowers and grass of a Roman field,—but still all seemed softened and vague as if looked at through a telescope that had the power to draw into its line of vision ages long past.
Who knows? Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an understanding between us.
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