DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE ROMANS. 33 



occupying only a very small space. There is no individual 

 portraiture of particular localities,* but a deep arid intimate 

 comprehension of nature is depicted in soft colors. Where, 

 for instance, has the gentle play of the waves, or the stillness 

 of night been more happily described ? And how well do 

 these pleasing pictures contrast with the powerful description 

 of the bursting tempest in the first book of the Georgics, and 

 the picture in the ./Eneid of the voyage and landing at the 

 Strophades, the crashing fall of the rock, or the flames emitted 

 from Mount J^tna.t 



From Ovid we might have expected, as the fruit of his long 

 sojourn in the plains of Tomi, in Lower Mossia, a poetic de- 

 scription of the marshes, of which, however, no account has 

 been transmitted to us from antiquity. The exile did not 

 indeed see that kind of steppe-like plain, which in summer is 

 densely covered with juicy plants, varying from four to six feet 

 in height, and which in every breath of wind present the as- 

 pect of a waving sea of flowering verdure. The place of 

 his banishment was a desolate, swampy marsh-land, and the 

 broken spirit of the poet, which gives itself vent in unmanly 

 lamentation, was preoccupied with the recollection of the en- 

 joyments of social life arid the political occurrences at Rome, 

 and thus remained dead to the impressions produced by the 

 contemplation of the Scythian desert, with which he was sur- 

 rounded. As a compensation, however, this highly-gifted poet, 

 whose descriptions of nature are so vivid, has given us, besides 

 his too frequently-repeated representations of grottoes, springs, 

 and " calm moon-light nights," a remarkably characteristic, 

 and even geognostically important delineation of a volcanic 

 eruption at Methone, between Epidaurus arid Troezene. The 

 passage to which we allude has already been cited in another 

 part of this work.J Ovid shows us, as our readers will re- 



* The passages from Virgil, which are adduced by Malte-Brun (An- 

 nales des Voyages, t. iii., 1808, p. 235-266) as local descriptions, merely 

 show that the poet had a knowledge of the produce of different coun- 

 tries, as, for instance, the saffron of Mount Tmolus; that he was ac- 

 quainted with the incense of the Sabeans, and with the true names of 

 several small rivers; and that even the mephitic vapors which rise from 

 a cavern in the Apennines, near Amsanctus, were not unknown to him. 



t Virg., Georg., i., 356-392; iii., 349-380; Jn., iii., 191-211; iv., 

 246-251; xii., 684-689. 



t Compare Ovid, Met., i., 568-576; iii., 155-164; iii., 407-412; vii., 

 180-188; xv., 296-306; Trist., l^Jo. i., El. 3, 60; lib. iii., El. 4, 49; 

 El. 12, 15 ; Ex Ponto, lib. iii., Ep. 7-9, as instances of separate pictures 

 of natural scenery. There is a pleasant description of a spring at Hy> 

 mettus, beginning with the verse, 



B2 



