It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.
It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding shallowness and lassitude.
Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic. Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his Conflict between Winter and Spring, as well as in many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[[36]]
His Farewell to his Cell caught the idyllic tone very neatly:
Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!
Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!
Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,
Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,
To meditation oft my mind disposed.
Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs