But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:—
“Molle atque facetum
Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—
To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil afterwards produced, among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have won for him.
With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known. But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real, borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe of tender reeds.
Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from the Sicilian poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere translator, but proves by the tender grace of the language in which he clothes the borrowed imagery his feeling for original Nature. In the fifth Eclogue, when two shepherds have been playing each his finest strain, partly to please, partly to emulate the other, at the close, Menalcas says to Mopsus:—
“Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!
As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,
Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”
And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of Mopsus:—