Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert. Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[[39]]; the great forest grove, the grassy meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the thicket stocked with many kinds of game.
At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the asceticism of the poetry of the saints.'
Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.
In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a second Cæsar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden Age.
In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same strong colouring, Paradise.
The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in the much-read Hortulus of Wahlafried.[[40]]
Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.
They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.
There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance:
A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.