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for searching only. 494 SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE
the race of man and beast, the life of winged things, and the strange shapes ocean bears beneath his glassy floor. Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those life-seeds, so far as harmful bodies clog them not, nor earthly limbs and mortal frames dull them. Hence their fears and desires, their griefs and joys; nor discern they the light, pent up in the gloom of their dark dungeon.11e
Shakspere once expresses exactly the same idea as to the relation of body, soul, and stars; and expresses it in language which suggests Virgil's passage.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.117
This muddy vesture of decay, our earthy body, clogs the soul in its communion with the divine. The soul, therefore, cannot hear the music of the spheres. Virgil's passage begins with the spirit which sustains the shining heavens, earth, and sea. This fiery vigor is in man, but clogged and dulled by earthly bodies. Shakspere's passage begins with the music of the shining spheres. This harmony is in immortal souls, but so long as the body closes it in, we cannot hear it. Where Shakspere actually had the fundamental idea, of which the music of the spheres is only one instance, does not appear. He ought to have found it, among other places, in this passage of Virgil. The structure of the two passages is similar, and there is something about Shakspere's phrasing which keeps reminding one of that of Virgil. We know then that Shakspere had a considerable knowledge of the classical Hades, which hails ultimately from Virgil's sixth book. He also uses in at least two passages ideas, expressed in parallel form and phraseology to passages in this same book. All this knowledge should have come from having read Virgil in grammar school.
Incidentally, the commentators have shed much Christian ink trying to explain Shakspere's "patines of bright gold" from nature in-stead of from art. Virgil's passage will illustrate how such figures grew. Virgil wrote of the lucentemque gloaum lunae and Titan's star. Now Cooper defines globus as "A bowie or other thing very rofide,"
"6 Fakclough, Virgil (Loeb), Vol. I, pp. 556-557; /feneid, VI, 724-734. Yi7 Merchant of Venice, V, I, 58-65.
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