104 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



The Romans, tried in the alembic of the great German savan, 

 are found still colder in their love of nature's charms than the 

 Greeks. "A nation which manifested a marked predilection for 

 agriculture and rural life might have justified other hopes; but 

 with all their capacity for practical activity, the Romans, in their 

 cold gravity and measm-ed 'sobriety of understanding, were, as a 

 people, far inferior to the Greeks in the perception of beauty, far 

 less sensitive to its influence, and much more devoted to the reali- 

 ties of every-day life, than to an idealizing contemplation of 

 nature." 



Judging them by then- writings, Humboldt pronounces the great 

 Roman writers to be comparatively destitute of real poetic feeling 

 for nature. Livy and Tacitus show, in their histories, little or no in- 

 terest ia natural scenery. Cicero describes landscape without poetic 

 feeling. Phny, though he rises to true poetic inspiration when de- 

 scribing the great moving causes of the natural universe, " has few 

 individual descriptions of nature." Ovid, in his exile, saw little to 

 -charm him in the scenery around him ; and Virgil, though he often 

 ;devoted himself to subjects which prompt the enthusiasm of a lover 

 of nature, rarely glows with the "fire of a true worshipper of her mys- 

 terious charms. And not only were the Romans indifferent to the 

 beauty of natural landscape which daily surrounded them, but even 

 to the sublimity and magaifioence of those wilder and grander 

 scenes, into which their love of conquest often led them. The fol- 

 lowing striking paragraph, from Humboldt's work, is at once elo- 

 quent and convincing on this point : 



" No description of the eternal snows of the Alps, when tinged 

 in the morning or evening with a rosy hue, — of the beauty of the 

 blue glacier ice, or of any part of the grandeur of the scenery in 

 Switzerland, — ^have reached us from the ancients, although states- 

 men and generals, with men of letters in their train, were constantly 

 passing froin Helvetia into Gaul. All these travellers think only of 

 complaining of the difficulties of the way ;• the romantic character 

 of the scenery seems never to have engaged their attention. ■ It is 

 even known that Julius Csesar, when returning to his legions, in 

 Gaul, employed his time while passing over the Alps in preparing a 

 grammaticar treatise, ' De' Analogia.' " 



