154 Landscape Gardening 



The Romans, tried in the alembic of the great German 

 writer, are found slill colder in their love of nature's charms 

 than the Greeks. "A nation which manifested a marked 

 predilection for agriculture and rural life might have justi- 

 fied other hopes; but with all their capacity for practical 

 activity, the Romans, in their cold gravity and measured 

 sobriety of understanding, were, as a people, far inferior to 

 the Greeks in the perception of beauty, far less sensitive 

 to its influence, and much more devoted to the realities 

 of every-day life, than to an idealizing contemplation of 

 nature." 



Judging them by their writings, Humboldt pronounces 

 the great Roman writers to be comparatively destitute of 

 real poetic feeling for nature. Livy and Tacitus show, in 

 their histories, little or no interest in natural scenery. Cicero 

 describes landscape without poetic feeling. Pliny, though 

 he rises to true poetic inspiration when describing the great 

 moving causes of the natural universe, "has few individual 

 descriptions of nature." Ovid, in his exile, saw little to 

 charm him in the scenery around him; and Virgil, though 

 he often devoted himself to subjects which prompt the en- 

 thusiasm of a lover of nature, rarely glo\vs with the fire of a 

 true worshipper of her mysterious charms. And not only 

 were the Romans indifferent to the beauty of natural land- 

 scape which daily surrounded them, but even to the sub- 

 limity and magnificence of those wilder and grander scenes, 

 into which their love of conquest often led them. The fol- 

 lowing striking paragraph, from Humboldt's work, is at 

 once eloquent and convincing on this point: 



"No description of the eternal snows of the Alps, when 

 tinged in the morning or evening with a rosy hue, - - of the 

 beauty of the blue glacier ice, or of any part of the grandeur 

 of the scenery in Switzerland, - - have reached us from the 

 ancients, although statesmen and generals, with men of 

 letters in their train, were constantly passing from Helvetia 

 into Gaul. All these travellers think only of complaining 

 of the difficulties of the way; the romantic character of 

 the scenery seems never to have engaged their attention. 



