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quoted by Wordsworth. The epithets given to trees, flowers, or animals seem now more distinctive; they are often geographical, partly, doubtless, from that delightful inherent suggestiveness of names remote in place or famous in song, which other poets also have felt, partly to aid the reader in realising the scene. Other frequent epithets, as happy, joyful, and their contraries, imply a kind of personal life underlying Nature. These are indeed the natural expression of the sensitive heart or observant mind in all ages; from Lucretius to our own day the most merely materialistic Science has found it impossible to describe natural details without recourse to metaphors which are at variance with her own assumptions.

More than elsewhere, Vergil, in the Georgics, appears as a naturalist. Here he doubtless was indebted for much to the erudite but generally prosaic verse-writers of AlexandriaAratus or Nicander. No poet, I think, unless we except Tennyson, our Vergil, has united learning, at once so much and so varied, with such consummate art, has so completely absorbed and then created afresh his material. But Vergil also constantly shows with what affectionate care he had studied Italian country scenes and life from Lombardy to Sicily. Above all, perhaps, his knowledge of trees is marked; a charming memory from childhood, if we recall that his father was a farmer and a wood-merchant: whence Vergil has been described to us in antiquity as "a Venetian [Lombard] a Venetian [Lombard] . . . reared in a rough woodland country." " 1 The child was truly father to the man, rather, never died out in him.

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How does Vergil lift his endless particulars of rural life, his Farmer's Guide, a subject purely didactic, into one of the very most exquisite poems in all literature? He tells us himself: singula capti circumvectamur amore-charmed with the love of it, we linger around every detail. His success came primarily and essentially through his own personal enthusiasm for woods and rivers, for the common sights of the country, for the landscape loved in childhood, associating them constantly with human relations, finding and revealing everywhere the beautiful in each. Yet the all-pervading sensibility which 1 Macrobius v, 2; quoted by Sellar.

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colours his verse, the sweet persuasiveness of style, the unerring eye, very rarely lead him to direct landscape description: he cannot break through the classical law of reserve. Hence it is hard to offer examples of Vergil's skill; in Juvenal's phrase, "I cannot display it, I only feel it." Perhaps when he breaks out into the passionate praise of Italy-loved by him not less than England by Wordsworth as a lover or a child"—his pictorial power is seen at its best. After an admirable review of the forest scenery of the world known to him, he bursts forth exultingly with the cry how neither Media nor India nor fabled Arabia can vie with Italy

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Here is constant spring and summer in months other than its own here trees bear a double harvest. . . . Add the noble cities of Italy, how many; how many towns piled up by man upon the steep crags, and rivers flowing beneath ancient walls. Should I not speak of the sea of Adria, and the Tuscan? Or of those mighty lakes, Como greatest, and Garda heaving with the very billows and the roar of ocean.1

The charm of these lines vanishes indeed, in my meagre prose, as a flower vanishes in a red-hot crucible, to take Shelley's fine phrase upon the translation of poetry; but their magic has survived, through all the centuries:—as we see when Tennyson sings how he was haunted by the music of

The rich Virgilian rustic measure

Of Lari Maxume

just as the exquisite song to his lost brother by Catullus, he,—— the

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Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago,

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1 hic ver adsiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas:
bis gravidae pecudes, bis pomis utilis arbos.
adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem,
tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis

fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros.

an mare quod supra memorem, quodque adluit infra?

anne lacus tantos? te, Lari maxime, teque,

fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino?-Georg. II, 149.

moved our poet to the lovely lines on Catullus' home at Sirmio on Garda

Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row.

And here I may fitly quote four more verses from Vergil upon the gathering of a storm

Forthwith, as the winds rise, the inlets of the sea begin to swell as they move, and a dry crashing is heard upon the lofty mountains, and the shores are confusedly resounding from afar, and the murmur of the woods grows deeper.

Now for the poet himself1

continuo ventis surgentibus aut freta ponti
incipiunt agitata tumescere et aridus altis
montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe

litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur.

I quote these lines, remembering how Tennyson would read them to me in the days that are no more, saying that from the magnificent music of the Vergilian hexameter, as here exemplified, he believed Milton caught (or recognised) his own splendid blank verse movement in the Paradise.

To sum up this imperfect criticism, whilst Lucretius scientifically interrogates Nature, Vergil, though longing to investigate, embraces her. Lucretius was sensitive to landscape in its vastness, Horace (as we shall presently see) in its home scenes: Vergil unites both aspects.

Natural descrip

The Aeneid may be briefly dismissed. tion can have but little place in an epic. That of Vergil, when brought in as background to the human figures, is treated with his usual art, but cannot be parted from his story. When he employs nature in the way of simile, whilst imitating Homer, he often falls below him. But he has introduced two bright pictures from insect life: the bees whose toil is compared with that of the builders from Carthage, and the ants as they store grain for winter.

Briefer notice must suffice for the remaining Latin singers

1 Georg. I, 356.

of the Augustan age. Lyrical poetry until modern days has not been fertile in landscape. Yet, to revert to the earlier period, Catullus (c. 87-c. 54 B.C.), beside that lovely Return to Sirmio which inspired Tennyson's lines already alluded to, and which may be said to unite perfect human feeling with perfect painting of nature, in an idyll has left us one admirable sea-piece, worthy of Venetian art in its brilliant colouring—

Zephyr with morning breath ruffling the calm sea drives the waves into slanting slopes, as dawn uprises to the threshold of the roving sun; smitten at first with gentle stroke, the waves slowly move onward, ripple and laugh as they softly plash; then as the gust increases, they too more and more come thicker one upon another, and as they sail far off reflect a brightness from the glowing light.1

The poetical gifts in which Catullus has found few rivals may be felt here; the exquisitely vivid pictorial treatment, the fresh first-hand rendering of the scene, the sincerity of vision, the seemingly effortless power.

Horace (65-8 B.C.), with an art even more perfect, does not always command this simplicity, this poetry of the "first "intention." His was truly a felicity of phrase, resting on supreme painstaking — curiosa,—and with it, an undying charm, and a command over his readers, from century to century, not otherwise attainable. Horace, also, more maiorum, Yet this was from no want

paints for us but few landscapes.

of due love-far from it; it was his feeling, not less than Vergil's, that country life was essential to true poetical work. He has not Vergil's sympathy with Nature in her manifold life, nor with Lucretius in her gloom and magnificence. It is the landscape-largely yet not exclusively the landscape of cultivation endeared to his heart of hearts by intimacy and 1-flatu placidum mare matutino horrificans Zephyrus proclivas incitat undas, Aurora exoriente vagi sub limina Solis ; quae tarde primum clementi flamine pulsae procedunt,-leni resonant plangore cachinni,post vento crescente magis magis increbrescunt purpureaque procul nantes a luce refulgent.

Epithal. Pel. et Thet. 269.

by possession, the natural pride of the freehold, that rule him. To the peace and beauty of the streams that flow by fruitful Tivoli, and the thick foliage of the groves, it is that he ascribes his distinction in Aeolian song. That love of Nature which is one of the greatest charms of his art may be said to be the condition of its existence.2

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Horace condenses into one phrase the features of a whole landscape, as Autumn raising his head over the fields, adorned with mellow apples, or how a stream of pure water and a grove of a few acres and my never-disappointing harvest, are enough for his happiness. Why choose wearisome wealth in exchange for my Sabine Valley ?5 So again of his beloved Tivoli : Founded by an Argive colony, he says, with a poet's feeling for the romance of antiquity, I pray this may be the abode of my old age; the last home for one tired of voyage and road and soldiership. That corner of the world smiles to me beyond all others, where the honey equals Hymettus and the olive Venafrum with its greenery, where Jove grants a long Spring and mild Winter, and Mount Aulon, friendly to the fertile vine, has no reason to envy the grapes of Falernum.

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-quae Tibur aquae fertile praefluunt,

et spissae nemorum comae

fingent Aeolio carmine nobilem.

2 W. Y. Sellar, Horace and the Elegiac Poets (1892).

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What an indescribable charm and fineness of touch has Horace put into these phrases! Those who cannot find the great poet in him should lay aside poetry; in Sappho's words, they have no share in the roses of Pieria. 6 Tibur Argeo positum colono

sit meae sedes utinam senectae,
sit modus lasso maris et viarum
militiaeque.

ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis
angulus ridet, ubi non Hymetto
mella decedunt viridique certat
baca Venafro;

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