in which the sincerity of the older master still asserts itself. There is great beauty however of pastoral scene, of pathos and human sympathy, of ethical contrast between the simple wants of the lower animals and the artificial luxury of human life, in Virgil’s description. In the lines 520–522 one of those scenes in which he most delighted is brought before the imagination:—
Non umbrae altorum nemorum, non mollia possunt
Prata movere animum, non qui per saxa volutus
Purior electro campum petit amnis[376].
The last element in the picture suggests at once the ‘Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles’ of the Eclogues, and the lines earlier in the book—
Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum
Flumina.
And the whole feeling of the passage is in harmony with that in Lucretius, ii. 361:—
Nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes
Fluminaque illa queunt summis labentia ripis