Intuentur, nec tuendi capere satietas potest.
Interea prope jam occidente sole inhorrescit mare,
Tenebræ conduplicantur, noctisque et nimbum occæcat nigror,
Flamma inter nubes coruscat, cælum tonitru contremit,
Grando mixta imbri largifico subita præcipitans cadit,
Undique omnes venti erumpunt, sævi existunt turbines,
Fervit æstu pelagus."
"Glad at heart when they set out they gaze at the sporting fish, and are never weary of looking at them. Meanwhile, hard upon sunset, the sea ruffles, darkness gathers thick, the blackness of the storm-clouded night hides everything, flame flashes between the clouds, heaven shakes with thunder, hail, mingled with streaming rain, dashes suddenly down, from every quarter all the winds tear forth, wild whirlwinds rise, the sea boils with the seething waters."
With Lucretius, indeed, he deals fully, and this portion of his work leaves little to be desired. But a reference to the lines to Sirmio and one illustration from the Peleus and Thetis exhaust his examples from Catullus. We should have expected the picture of the stream leaping from the mossy rock into the valley beneath, in the Epistle to Manlius, of the morning chasing away the shadows in the Attis, and the lovely flower pictures in the Epithalamia. In dealing with Virgil most of Mr. Palgrave's citations are practically irrelevant; scarcely any of the passages which best illustrate Virgil's power of landscape painting being even referred to. "The Æneid," says Mr. Palgrave, "may be briefly dismissed. Natural description can have but little place in an epic." And yet what are the passages to which any one, who wishes to illustrate the charm and power of Virgil's pictures of scenery, would naturally turn? Surely to these: the description of the rocky recess which sheltered Æneas's ships (Æneid, i. 159-168), a picture worthy of Salvator; the picture of Ætna (iii. 570-582), which rivals the picture of it given by Pindar, a picture praised so justly by Mr. Palgrave himself; the description of a calm night (iv. 522-527); the wave-buffeted, gull-haunted rock (v. 124-128); and, above all, the scenery at the mouth of the Tiber, bathed in the rays of the morning sun, a picture unexcelled even by Tennyson. Nor even in the Georgics is any reference made to the superb description of a storm in harvest time (i. 216-334), or to the magnificent winter piece (iii. 349-370).
The remarks about the indifference of Propertius to natural scenery are most unjust. What a charming picture is this!—