Coniugis adventu pernix Saturnus, et altum
Pelion hinnitu fugiens implevit acuto[357],
and
Munere sic niveo lanae, si credere dignum est,
Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit,
In nemora alta vocans; nec tu aspernata vocantem[358].
Such allusions came much more home to an ancient than to a modern reader. They were familiar to him from the pages of [pg 238]poets, or from pictures adorning the walls of his own town and country-houses, or seen in the temples and other sacred places of famous Greek and Asiatic cities, and forming great part of the attraction of those cities to travellers then, as the pictures seen in the galleries, palaces, and churches of Rome, Florence, and Venice do to travellers now. But though the colours of these poetic fancies have faded for us, they are felt to be a legitimate source of variety in the poem, and to be an element of interest connecting the humbler cares of the country-people with the refined tastes of the educated class. They are not introduced as a substitute for truthful representation of fact, but rather as adding a new grace to this representation. Neither do they, as in Propertius, overlay the main subject of the poem by their redundant use. They probably produced the same kind of impression on an ancient reader, as allusions from the works of Latin or Italian poets in Spenser or Milton produce on a modern reader. Occasionally they may seem weak and faulty from their incongruity with the thought with which they are associated. Thus in the passage at i. 60, etc.,—
Continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis
Imposuit natura locis, quo tempore primum
Deucalion vacuum lapides iactavit in orbem,