DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE ROMANS. 387 



scnpe only constitutes the background, 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 u* 

 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 orna- 

 tion of his diction, but yet we find amongst his works an 

 admirable and vividly truthful picture of the destruction of a 

 Druidic forest,* on the now treeless shores of Marseilles. 

 The half-severed oaks support themselves for a time by 

 leaning tottering 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 depicted the luxuriant growth of trees, whose colossal 

 remains lie buried in some of the turf moors of France. In 

 the didactic poem of jEtna by Lucilius the younger, a friend 

 of L. Annaeus 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 ^Etna Dialogus,] by Bembo, of which 

 we have already spoken in terms of praise. 



When, finally, at the close of the fourth centuiy, the art of 

 poetry in its grander and nobler forms, faded away, as if 

 exhausted, poetic emanations, stripped of the charms of crea- 

 tive fancy, turned aside to the barren realities of science and 

 of description. A certain oratorical polish of style could 

 not compensate for the diminished susceptibility for nature, 

 and an idealising inspiration. As a production of this 

 unfruitful age, in which the poetic element only appeared at 

 an incidental external adornment of thought, we may instance 

 a poem on the Moselle by Ausonius. As a native of Aqui- 

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

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

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

 by Wernsdorf to Cornelius Severus- The passages especially worth;/ 

 of attention are the praises of general knowledge considered as " the 

 fruits of the mind," v. 270-280; the lava currents, v. 360-370 and 

 474-515; the eruptions of water at the foot of the volcano (1), v. 395' 

 the formation of pumice, v. 425 (p. xvi.--xx. 32, 42, 46, 50, 55, e<7 

 Jacob, 1826.) 



2 c2 



