34 COSMOS. 



member, " how, by the force of the impregnated vapor, the 

 earth was distended like a bladder filled with air, or like the 

 skin of the goat." 



It is especially to be regretted that Tibullus should have 

 left no great composition descriptive of the individual charac- 

 ter of nature. Among the poets of the Augustan age, he be- 

 longs to the few who, being happily strangers to the Alexan- 

 drian learning, and devoted to seclusion and a rural life, drew 

 with feeling, and therefore with simplicity, from the resources 

 of their own mind. Elegies,* of which the landscape only 

 constitutes the back-ground, must certainly be regarded as 

 mere pictures of social habits ; but the Lustration of the 

 Fields, and the Sixth Elegy of the first book, show us what 

 was to have been expected from the friend of Horace and of 

 Messala. 



Lucan, the grandson of the rhetorician M. Annseus Seneca, 

 certainly resembles the latter too much in the rhetorical or- 

 nation of his diction, but yet we find among his works an ad- 

 mirable and vividly truthful picture of the destruction of a 

 Druidic forestt on the now treeless shores of Marseilles. The 

 half-severed oaks support themselves for a time by leaning tot- 

 tering against each other, and, stripped of their leaves, suffer 

 the first ray of light to pierce their awful and sacred gloom. 

 He who has long lived amid the forests of the New World 

 must feel how vividly the poet, with a few touches, has de- 

 picted the luxuriant growth of trees, whose colossal remains 

 lie buried in some of the turf moors of France. In the di- 

 dactic poem of JEtna by Lucilius the younger, a friend of L. 

 Annseus Seneca, we certainly meet with a truthful description 

 of the phenomena attending the eruption of a volcano ; but 

 the conception has much less of individuality than the work 

 entitled JEtna Dialogus,'^. by Bembo, of which we have al- 

 ready spoken in terms of praise. 



" Est prope purpureos colles florentis Hymetti" 



(Ovid, de Arte. Am., iii., 687), which, as Ross has remarked, is one of 

 the rave instances that occur of individual delineations of nature refer- 

 ring to a definite locality. The poet describes the fountain of Kallia, 

 sacred to Aphrodite, so celebrated in antiquity, which breaks forth on 

 the western side of Hymettus, otherwise so scantily supplied with wa- 

 ter. (See Ross, Letter to Professor Vuros, in the Grieck. Medicin. 

 Zeitschrift, June, 1837. 



* Tibullus, ed. Voss, 1811, Eleg., lib. i., 6, 21-34; lib. ii., 1, 37-66. 



t Lucan, Phars.. iii., 400-452 (vol. i., p. 374-384, Weber). 



t The poem of Lucilius, which is very probably a part of a larger 

 poetic work, on the natural characteristics of Sicily, was ascribed by 



