CHAPTER LXV.
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.
