We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing
beauty upon her son Æneas.

--lumenque juventæ
Purpureum, et lætos oculis afflârat honores:
Quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
Argentum Pariusve lapis circundatur auro.

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and Æneas: and
in his Georgics, which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings,
the Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the
Bees, and those many other excellent images of nature, most of which are
neither great in themselves, nor have any natural ornament to bear them
up: but the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent that it
might be well applied to him, which was said by Ovid, _Materiam
superabat opus_: the very sound of his words has often somewhat that is
connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play,
beholding the scenes of what he represents. To perform this, he made
frequent use of tropes, which you know change the nature of a known
word, by applying it to some other signification; and this is it which
Horace means in his epistle to the Pisos:

Dixeris egregiè, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum--

But I am sensible I have presumed too far to entertain you with a rude
discourse of that art, which you both know so well, and put into
practice with so much happiness. Yet before I leave Virgil, I must own
the vanity to tell you, and by you the world, that he has been my master
in this poem: I have followed him everywhere, I know not with what