20 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



Epidaurus and Troezene, which has been referred to in the 

 "General View of Nature" contained in the preceding 

 volume ( 30 ). 



It is especially to be regretted that Tibullus should not 

 have left us any great composition descriptive of natural 

 scenery, general or individual. He belongs to the few 

 among the poets of the Augustan age who, being happily 

 strangers to the Alexandrian learning, and devoted to retire- 

 ment and a rural life, full of feeling and therefore simple, 

 drew from their own resources. Elegies are indeed portraits 

 of mind and manners of which the landscape forms only the 

 background; but the Lustration of the Fields and the 6th 

 Elegy of the first book shew what might have been expected 

 from the friend of Horace and Messala. ( 31 ) 



Lucan, the grandson of the rhetor Marcus Annseus 

 Seneca, is indeed only too nearly related to his progenitor 

 in the rhetorical ornateness of his style ; yet we find among 

 his writings a fine description of the destruction of a Druidic 

 forest ( 32 ) on the now treeless shore of Marseilles, which is 

 thoroughly true to nature : the severed oaks, leaning against 

 each other, support themselves for a time before they fall ; 

 and, denuded of their leaves, admit the first ray of light to 

 penetrate the awful gloom of the sacred shade. Those who 

 have lived long in the forests of the New Continent, feel 

 how vividly the poet has depicted, with a few traits, the 

 luxuriant growth of trees whose giant remains are still found 

 buried in turf bogs in Prance ( 33 ). 



In a didactic poem entitled JStna, written by Lucilius 

 the Younger, a friend of L. Annseus Seneca, the pheno- 

 mena of a volcanic eruption are described, not inaccurately, 

 but yet in a far less animated and characteristic manner than 



