Note 49 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
Yet, in spite of these imperfections, both his rhythm and language produce the impression of power and originality. With all the roughness and irregularity of his measure, and notwithstanding the inharmonious structure of continuous passages, his lines often have a weighty and impressive effect, like that produced by some of the great passages in Lucretius and Virgil. It is said of the rhetorician Aelian that he excessively admired in Ennius both 'the greatness of his mind and the grandeur of his metre49.' Something of this sonorous grandeur may be recognised in a fragment descriptive of the havoc made by woodcutters in a great forest,—a passage in which the language of Ennius again appears as a connecting link between that of Homer and of Virgil:—