One side of this feeling, which is dwelt on as peculiarly a birth of recent times, is the passion for mountains. And no doubt the feeling of the Latin poets as they thought of them was for the most part shuddering and affright. Yet Virgil, though he generally speaks the same language, seems at times to catch something of their free and far delight, as when he speaks of Father Apennine roaring with all his holm-oaks, and rejoicing to heave his snow-white summit into the sky. In such a passage it would seem as though the power of hills was for a moment on him, and he caught a prophetic glimpse of that mountain-rapture which was reserved for this century at last adequately to express. Quinctilian, however, represents the current feeling of his countrymen when he says, “Species maritimis, planis, amœnis,”—Beauty belongs to countries that lie beside the sea, level and pleasant. But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:— “Molle atque facetum Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”— To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil afterwards produced, among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have won for him. With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known. But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real, borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe of tender reeds.