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But what is in them to compare for a moment with the passionate earnestness of the quotation just made from Longfellow, or with the enchanted enthusiasm, the mad whirl of excitement, in the addresses of some of our other poets to the sky-lark? Wordsworth and Shelley and Hogg--but, why, the difference is as great as in passing suddenly from the first streak of dawn to mid-day summer sunshine, or from the chilliness of our northern spring to the heat of a tropical summer; and it needs no further comment. We pass to the

Roman poets.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF TASTE, IN RELATION ESPECIALLY TO THE BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE: THE ROMANS.

IN passing from the Greeks to a consideration of the place of the Roman poets in the development of taste there are some things, we think, which we may take for granted. It will save time and labour, and, as we deem it, superfluous reference and quotation.

First of all, we may assume that, like men from even prehistoric times we may say, the Romans generally, and the poets in particular, had a joy in the light of morning, in the singing of birds and in brooks and flowers, in groves and meadows and in rich pasture lands, in the whispering of leaves and the perfume of flowers, and in fragrance generally. generally. No one who knows anything about the poets, or about human nature even, can have any doubt about that. And, in the second place, we may assume that their joy in these things had an aesthetic element in it: that they loved them as we do for their loveliness as well as for the more sensuous pleasures they afforded in the comforts of the body present or prospective, for their beauty as well as for their use. And though paragraphs are to be met with in literature which would seem to imply a doubt of it, there can really be no more reasonable question of that than of our former assumption.

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Flowers were fair and fragrant to the Romans as they are to us, and they speak of them as such; and when children went out to gather them, and up-grown people decked themselves, or their cattle, or their tombs with wreaths, they did so (and it is hard to conceive any other reason for it) because they thought them beautiful, and delighted in ornament for themselves and their gods. And it was the same with the other aspects of nature to which we have referred. Soothing to the nerves they might be and a luxury to the fancy, but at the same time they were fair and lovely as the flowers. "And now each field, now every tree buds forth, now the woods break into leaf, now fairest is the year"1 And how the poets loved the country every reader of Lucretius, or Virgil, or Horace, or Ovid knows; or, if it has slipped his memory, he may easily renew his knowledge by a reference to De Rerum Natura, ii. 20-36, the second Georgic, 458 et seq., the second Epode, and the Metamorphoses, we might almost say ad aperturam.

It is perhaps not going beyond the assumptions thus made to say that the Romans were lovers of landscape in the sense of far-outreaching glimpses of field and forest and shore, and that they delighted in sites for houses from which they could obtain such prospects of the picturesque. But perhaps it will be necessary to lead proof of that; and the task, we think, will not be a hard one.

"And you, ye dancing waters of the lake,
Rejoice; and every smile of home awake!

1 Virgil, Eclogue iii., Lonsdale and Lee's translation, from which all quotations from Virgil are made.

SITE OF CATULLUS' HOUSE.

67

Dear Sirmio, that art the very eye

So

Of islands and peninsulas that lie
Deeply embosomed in calm inland lake,

Or where the waves of the vast ocean break;

Joy of all joys to gaze on thee once more!"

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sang Catullus to Sirmio. And "on the beautiful peninsula of Sirmio," says Theodore Martin, "was situated the poet's patrimonial country-house. This promontory, which projects into the Lacus Benacus, now the Lago di Garda, was about two miles in circumference. 'Sirmione,' says Eustace (Classical Tour, V. i., c. v. 8vo edit.), appears as an island, so low and so narrow is the bank that unites it to the mainland. The promontory spreads behind the town and rises into a hill entirely covered with olives. In the centre of a magnificent lake, surrounded with scenery of the greatest variety and majesty, secluded from the world, and yet beholding from his garden the villas of his Veronese friends, he might enjoy equally the pleasures of retirement and society. More convenience and more beauty are seldom united. The soil is fertile; the surface is varied, sometimes shelving in gentle declivities, at other times breaking into craggy magnificence, and thus furnishing every requisite for delightful walks and luxurious baths; while the views vary at every turn, presenting rich coasts or barren mountains, sometimes confined to the cultivated scenes of the neighbouring shore, and at other times bewildered and lost in the windings. of the lake or the recesses of the Alps.""1 The description, as it seems to us, is at once apt and interesting, and it may help us perhaps to give a new intensity to the words of Cicero when he

1 The Poems of Catullus, pp. 213-214.

exclaims, Quanta maris est pulchritudo! quae species universi! quae multitudo et varietas insularum quae amoenitates orarum et littorum!" And it is a confirmation of the saying of Horace that "a house is praised which surveys a length of fields.”2 And the same thing is implied when, addressing Maecenas, he bids him

"Leave Tibur sparkling with its thousand rills;
Forget the sunny slopes of Aesulae,

And ragged peaks of Telagonian hills
That frown defiance on the Tuscan sea.
Forego vain pomps, nor gaze around
From the tall turret of the palace home

On crowded masts, and summits temple-crowned,
The smoke, the tumult, and the wealth of Rome."3

Can anything more be wanted in proof of our position that the Romans were lovers of landscape in the sense of far outlying stretches of field and stream and sea, and that it is not such a "novelty" as it has been thought to be? But there is more than even that in the quotations we have given. There is the mention of hills as well as fields and sea and shore, and there is evidence enough for believing, in spite of all assertions to the contrary, that they loved the roughnesses of rocks, and jagged peaks, and mountain heights, and hollow caves. Lucretius writes as if it had been quite a customary thing for him to wander with companions among the mountains listening for the echoes redoubled by the rocks.

"Whence may'st thou solve, ingenuous! to the world.

The rise of echoes, formed in desert scenes,

1 De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. 39.

2 Epistles, b. i. 10.

3 Odes, b. iii. 29. The Spectator, Aug. 15, 1885.

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