COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE ROMANS. 387
scape only constitutes the background, must certainly be
regarded as mere pictures of social habits, but the Lustration
of the Fields < and the Sixth Elegy of the first book show us
what was to have been expected from the friend of Horace
and of Messala.
Lucan, the grandson of the rhetorician M. Annseus Seneca,
certainly resembles the latter too much in the rhetorical orna-
tion of his diction, but yet we find amongst his works an
admirable and vividly
truthful picture of the destruction of a
Druidic forest,* on the now treeless shores of Marseilles.
The half-severed oaks support themselves for a time by
leaning tottering against each other; and stripped of their
leaves, suffer the first ray of light to pierce their awful and
sacred gloom. He who has long lived amid the forests of the
New World, must feel how vividly the poet with a few touches
has depicted the luxuriant growth of trees, whose colossal
remains lie buried in some of the turf moors of France. In
the didactic poem of JEtna by Lucilius the younger, a friend
of L. Annans Seneca, we certainly meet with a truthful
description of the phenomena attending the eruption of a
volcano; but the conception has much less of individuality
than the work entitled JEtna Dialogus,] by Bembo, of which
we have already spoken in terms of praise.
When, finally, at the close of the fourth century, the art of
poetry in its grander and nobler forms, faded away, as if
exhausted, poetic emanations, stripped of the charms of creative
fancy, turned aside to the barren realities of science and
of description. A certain oratorical polish of style could
not compensate for the diminished susceptibility
for nature,
and an idealising inspiration. As a production of this
unfruitful age, in which the poetic element only appeared a*
an incidental external adornment of thought, we may instance
a poem on the Moselle by Ausonius. As a native of Aqui-
* Lucan, PJiars., iii. 400-452 (vol. i. p. 374-384, Weber).
+ The poem of Lucilius, which is very probably a part of a largei
poetic work, on the natural characteristics of Sicily, was ascribed
by Wernsdorf to Cornelius Severus. The passages especially wortbj
of attention are the praises of general knowledge considered as " the
fruits of the mind," v. 270-280; the lava currents, v. 360--370 and
474--515; the eruptions of water at the foot of the volcano (?), v. 395;
the formation of pumice, v. 425 (p. xvi.-xx. 32, 42, 46, 50, 55, ed.
Jacob, 1326.)
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