The Barque of Dante, 1822, by Eugène Delacroix. Inspired by Dante's Inferno, the painting depicts Virgil, the sorcerer-poet, and Dante in the underworld
Well then, a moment ago, I erred in saying that we did not know Virgil the Magician. There is only one Virgil: the very one whom the fabulous chronicle [Cronaca di Partenope] sketches amid the shadows of magic is the poet himself. In truth, he possessed but one kind of magic—the grand and solemn poetry of his spirit. In the chronicle, it is the poet who appears.
The poet, with his long wanderings through that dreadful, beautiful, and tormented land that is the Phlegraean Fields, whence he dreamed of Avernus and the Styx; with his long wanderings through Campania Felix, where he acquired that deep love of nature—the love of the fertile fields stretching endlessly beneath the sun, of the green meadows where the ox with great eyes peacefully grazes, eyes in which the sky is reflected; the love of the dark, silent woods where the soul grows calm and drifts into repose; the love of the sunlit hills, where the free winds make whole fields of flowers sway; the love of the bird that sings and flies away, of the golden insect that hums, of the leaf carried off by the whirlwind, of the sturdy oak that nothing can shake: that profound love of nature which is the highest feeling of his poem, which is the magic by which he still enchants us, which is—with a word too modern, yet true—the nostalgia of his heart, the longing that makes him exclaim fortunator agricolas [blessed are the farmers], that gives to his descriptions so much color, so much light, so much life.
It is the poet who searches out and questions every hidden corner of nature; it is he who speaks to the stars trembling with rays in the summer nights; it is he who listens to the rhythm of the sea, as though it were the very measure by which his verse is scanned; it is the poet who knows the virtue of herbs, he who has discovered certain natural laws unknown to others; it is the civic poet who slays the beasts, drains the marshes, and raises in their place palaces and gardens; it is the poet who teaches the young the games that strengthen the body and soothe the soul; it is he—sublime, visionary—who ordains the omen of good or ill fortune; it is he who, like a powerful magnet, draws to himself love, reverence, and respect.
It is Virgil the poet. And nothing is known of his death. Like Parthenope, the woman, he vanishes. The poet does not die.
* Translations are my own