COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

386 COSMOS.
been transmitted to us from antiquity. The exile did not
indeed see that kind of steppe-like plain which in summer is
from four to six
densely covered with juicy plants, varying
feet in height, and which in every breath of wind present the
aspect of a waving sea of flowering verdure. The place of
his banishment was a desolate swampy marsh-land, and the
broken spirit of the poet, which gives itself vent in unmanly
lamentation, was preoccupied with the recollection of the
enjoyments of social life and the political occurrences at
Rome, and thus remained dead to the impressions produced
by the contemplation of the Scythian desert, with which he
was surrounded. As a compensation, however, this highly
gifted poet, whose descriptions of nature are so vivid, has
given us. besides his too frequently repeated representations of
grottoes, springs, and " calm moon-light nights," a remarkably
characteristic, and even geognostically important delineation
of a volcanic eruption at Methone, between Epidaurus
and Troezene. The passage to which we allude, has already
been cited at another part of this work.* Ovid shows us, as
our readers will remember, " how by the force of the impregnated
vapour, the earth was distended like a bladder filled
with air, or like the skin of the goat."
It is
especially
to be regretted that Tibullus should have
left no great composition descriptive of the individual character
of nature. Amongst the poets of the Augustan age, he
belongs to the few, who being happily strangers to the Alexandrian
learning, and devoted to seclusion and a rural life,
drew with feeling and therefore with simplicity from the
resources of their own mind. Elegies,f
of which the land-
* Compare Ovid, Met., I 568-576; iii. 155-164; iii. 407-412; vii.
180-188; xv. 296-306; Trist., lib. i., El 3, 60; ]\b. iii., El 4, 49;
El. 12, 15; Ex Ponto, lib. iii. Ep. 7-9, as instances of separate pictures
of natural scenery. There is a pleasant description of a spring at
Hymettus, beginning with the verse,
"
Est prope purpureos colles florentis Hyme ti,"
(Ovid, deArte. Am. iii. 687), which, as Ross has remarked, is one of the
rare instances that occur of individual delineations of na ".re, referring
to a definite locality. The poet describes the fountain of Xallia sacred
to Aphrodite, so celebrated in antiquity, which breaks forth on the western
side of Hymettus, otherwise so scantily supplied with vater. (See
Eoss, Letter 'to Professor Vuros, in the Griech. medicin. Zeitsclirifi,
June, 1837.
f Tibullus, ed. Voss, 1811, Eleg., lib. i. 6, 21-34;
lib. ii. 1. 37-66.