51�Թ�

In the Ann�es de P�lerinage, redolent of Vergilian meadows, soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious except Au Bord d'une Source?

Prescott was an inveterate punster, and his puns were almost invariably bad; but when his bachelor friends reproached him for his desertion of them, he laughed and answered them with the Vergilian line,— "Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus Amori"— a play upon words which Thackeray independently chanced upon many years later in writing Pendennis, and � propos of a very different Miss Amory.

It was a Vergilian vision magnified a million times; it was based also to a large extent on his own experience at Monticello where he had proved that it was possible to manufacture tools, to bake bricks, to make furniture, and to maintain a comparatively large family on the products of the soil.

He is convinced that major league baseball plays a bardic, mythic role in American society; the long, recurring seasons are an ongoing epic, Homeric or Vergilian or Dantesque, a vital locus of rapt assembly where enduring values are enacted and passed on.

Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts."