The great poets of human action and passion are for the most part to be ranked among the great poets of the outward world. If they do not seem to have penetrated with so much personal sympathy into the inner secret of the life of Nature, as the great contemplative poets of ancient and modern times, yet they show, in different ways, that their sense and imagination were powerfully affected both by her outward beauty and by her manifold energy. Homer, not so much by direct description of the scenes in which the action of his poems is laid, as by many indirect touches, by vivid imagery and picturesque epithets, reveals the openness of his mind to every impression from the outward world, and the fresh delight with which his imagination reproduced the impressions immediately received from the 'world of eye and ear.' If he has left any personal characteristic stamped upon his poetry, it is the trace of adventure and keen enjoyment in the open air, among the most stirring sights and sounds and forces of Nature. The imagery of Virgil is of a more peaceful cast. It seems rather to be 'the harvest of a quiet eye,' gathered in the conscious contemplation of rural beauty, and stored up for after use along with the products of his study and meditation. The fragments of Ennius, on the other hand, afford few indications either of active toil and unconscious enjoyment among the solitudes of Nature, or of the luxurious and pensive susceptibility to beauty by which the poetry of Virgil is pervaded. He was the poet, not of the woods and rivers, but, essentially, of the city and the camp. No sentiment could appear less appropriate to him than that of Virgil's modest prayer,-- Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. Yet both in his illustrative imagery and in his narrative, he occasionally reproduces with lively force, if not with much poetical ornament, some aspects of the outward world, as well as many real scenes from the world of action. His imagery is sometimes borrowed from that of Homer; as, for instance, the following simile, which is also imitated by Virgil:-- Et tum sic ut equus, qui de praesepibu' fartus, Vincla suis magnis animis abrupit, et inde Fert sese campi per caerula laetaque prata Celso pectore, saepe jubam quassat simul altam, Spiritus ex anima calida spumas agit albas[46]. Other illustrations are taken from circumstances likely to have been familiar to the men of his own time, but without any apparent intention of adding poetical beauty to the object he is representing. Thus the silent expectation with which the assembled people watch the rival auspices of Romulus and Remus is brought before the mind by an illustration suggested by, and suggestive of, the passionate eagerness with which the public games were witnessed by the Romans of his own age:-- Expectant vel uti consul cum mittere signum Volt, omnes avidi spectant ad carceris oras, Quam mox emittat pictis e faucibu' currus[47].