BY THE ROMANS. 19 



subordinate and accidental features, limited to a very small 

 space; individual localities are not pourtrayed ( 28 ), but an 

 intimate understanding and love of nature manifest them- 

 selves occasionally with peculiar beauty. Where have the 

 soft play of the waves, and the repose of night, ever been 

 more happily described ? and how finely do these mild and 

 tender images contrast with the powerful representations of 

 the gathering and bursting tempest in the first book of the 

 Georgics, and with the descriptions in the ^Eneid of the 

 navigation and landing at the Strophades, the crashing fall 

 of the rock, and of ^Etna with its flames ( 29 ). We might 

 have expected from Odd, as the fruit of his long sojourn in 

 the plains of Tomi in Lower Msesia, a poetic description of 

 the aspect of nature in the steppes ; but none such has come 

 down to us from antiquity, either from him or from any other 

 writer. The Roman exile did not indeed see that kind of 

 steppe which in summer is thickly covered by rich herbage 

 and flowering plants from four to .six feet high, which, as 

 each breeze passes over them, present the pleasing picture 

 of an undulating many-coloured sea of flowers and verdure. 

 The place of his banishment was a desolate marshy district. 

 The broken spirit of the exile, which yielded to unmanly 

 lamentations, was filled with recollections of the social 

 pleasures and the political occurrences of Borne, and had no 

 place for the contemplation of the Scythian desert by which 

 he was surrounded. On the other hand, this richly-gifted 

 poet, so powerful in vivid representation, has given us, 

 besides general descriptions of grottos, fountains, and silent 

 moonlight nights, which are but too frequently repeated, an 

 eminently-characteristic, and even geologically-important 

 description of the volcanic eruption at Methone between 



