any age a heroic age...

Yesterday, from Alibris, my favorite online used book seller, arrived Christopher Pearse Cranch's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. And today, I see, is the birthday of the great poet of the Roman Augustan age who was born in 70 BCE.
For the past week or so, Virgil's "Georgics" has been my morning devotional reading and I am looking forward to diving into Cranch's translation of the epic Aeneid.
Robert Richardson, in his illuminating biography of Henry David Thoreau, talks of Virgil's influence on the young Henry...

"Thoreau's sense of the nature of the classical achievement had...two main emphasis. The first is the assertion of the importance and permanence of nature. In November, reading Virgil...Thoreau was struck by passages about the buds swelling on the vines and fruit scattered about under the trees. The point, he told himself, was that 'It was the same world.' His second observation followed naturally enough. If Virgil's was the same world as ours, then 'the same men inhabited it.' Neither nature nor human nature has changed, in essence, from Virgil's time to ours...

In enunciating this belief in the permanence of nature and of human nature, and the equivalence of all eras-that any age is a heroic age to the heroic individual-we come to what is perhaps the single most important set of convictions for the young Thoreau. It was not a creed or a theoretical construct, but the core of his practical, daily, actual belief."

Blessings

Thor the Northman...

This in honor of Henry David Thoreau's birthday yesterday. It was written by his friend and fellow Concordian transcendentalist, A. Bronson Alcott and was included in his later book "Concord Days"

"THOREAU

My friend and neighbor united these qualities of sylvan and human in a more remarkable manner than any whom it has been my happiness to know. Lover of the wild, he lived a borderer on the confines of civilization, jealous of the least encroachment upon his possessions.

" Society were all but rude In his umbrageous solitude."

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time ; and had the human sentiment been as tender and pervading, would have given us pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have envied him the authorship had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it was, he came nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another, — responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with nature, his muse breathed the spirit and voice of poetry. For when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled and the love that sings.

The most welcome of companions was this plain countryman. One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers, — then drink and be cool! He seemed one with things, of nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, — like a wood and its inhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold, — the mould and mist of earth and sky Self-poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he had the key to every animal's brain, every plant; and were an Indian to flower forth and reveal the scents hidden in his cranium, it would hot be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He belonged to the Homeric age, — was older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes and one with the elements. He of all men seemed to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge ; our best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor, the Northman, whose name he bore."

Blessings