386 COSMOS. 



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 

 aspect 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 

 enjoyments of social life and the political occurrences at 

 Rome, and thus remained dead to the impressions produced 

 by the contemplation of the Scythian desert, with which he 

 was surrounded. 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 remark- 

 ably characteristic, and even geognostically important delinea- 

 tion of a volcanic eruption at Methone, between Epidaurus 

 and Troezene. The passage to which we allude, has already 

 been cited at another part of this work.* Ovid shows us, as 

 our readers will remember, " how by the force of the impreg- 

 nated vapour, 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 cha- 

 racter of nature. Amongst the poets of the Augustan age, he 

 belongs to the few, who being happily strangers to the Alex- 

 andrian learning, and devoted to seclusion and a rural life, 

 drew with feeling and therefore with simplicity from the 

 resources of their own mind. Elegies,f of which the land- 



* Compare Ovid, Met., I 568-576; iii. 155-164; iii. 407-412; vii. 

 180-188; xv. 296-306; Trist., lib. i., El 3, 60; ]\b. 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 

 Hymettus, beginning with the verse, 



" Est prope purpureos colles florentis Hyme ti," 



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

 rare instances that occur of individual delineations of na ".re, referring 

 to a definite locality. The poet describes the fountain of Xallia sacred 

 to Aphrodite, so celebrated in antiquity, which breaks forth on the west- 

 ern side of Hymettus, otherwise so scantily supplied with vater. (See 

 Eoss, Letter 'to Professor Vuros, in the Griech. medicin. Zeitsclirifi, 

 June, 1837. 



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



