DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE ROMANS. 385 



not leave it till the evening. Next to my Atticus nothing is 

 so dear to me as solitude, in which I hold communion with 

 philosophy, although often interrupted by my tears. I strug- 

 gle as much as I am able against such emotions, but as yet 

 I am not equal to the contest." It has frequently been 

 remarked, that in these letters and in those of the younger 

 Pliny, passages are met with which manifest the greatest 

 harmony with the expressions in use amongst modern senti- 

 mental writers; for my own part, I can only find in them the 

 echoes of the same deep-toned sadness, which in every age 

 and in every race bursts forth from the recesses of the heavily- 

 oppressed bosom. 



Amid the general diffusion of Roman literature, an ac- 

 quaintance with the great poetic works of Virgil, Horace, 

 and Tibullus is so common, that it would be superfluous to 

 dwell on individual examples of the tender and ever wakeful 

 sensibility to nature, by which some of these works are ani- 

 mated. In Virgil's great Epic, the nature of the poem tends 

 to make descriptions of scenery appear merely as accessories, 

 occupying only a very small space. There is no individual 

 portraiture of particular localities,* but a deep and intimate 

 comprehension of nature is depicted in soft colours. Where, 

 for instance, has the gentle play of the waves, or the stillness 

 of night been more happily described? And how well do 

 these pleasing pictures contrast with the powerful description 

 of the bursting tempest in the first book of the Georgics, 

 and the picture in the ^iEneid of the voyage and landing at 

 the Strophades, the crashing fall of the rock, or the flames 

 emitted from Mount Etna.f 



From Ovid, we might have expected as the fruit of his long 

 sojourn in the plains of Tomi in Lower Mcesia, a poetic de- 

 scription of the marshes, of which, however, no account has 



* The passages from Yirgil, which are adduced by Malte-Brun 

 (Annales des Voyages, t. iii. 1808, pp. 235-266,) as local descriptions, 

 merely show that the poet had a knowledge of the produce of different 

 countries, as for instance, the saffron of Mount Tmolus, that he was 

 acquainted with the incense of the Sabeans, and with the true names of 

 several small rivers, and that even the mephitic vapours which rise 

 from a cavern in the Apennines near Amsanetus, were not unknown to 

 him. 



h Virg., Georg., i. 356-392; iii. 349-380; JEn., iii, 191-211; iv. 

 246-251; xii. 684-689. 



