Note 13 — Chapter XI
Reading edition
recall the thought and spectacle of crime and bloodshed vividly presented to him in the impressible years of his youth13. Other passages are an immediate reflexion of the disturbance and alarm of the times in which the poem was written. Thus the opening lines of the second book, which contrast the security of the contemplative life with the strife of political and military ambition, seem to be suggested by the action of what is sometimes called the first triumvirate. The lines—