o need of rains to refresh it, and
the plants prosper by virtue of their own dew. The earth is
always verdant, and its surface animated by a sweet warmth
resplendent with beauty. Herbs never abandon the hills, the trees
never lose their leaves, etc.

And when Adam and Eve leave it, they find all the rest of the
beautiful world ugly and narrow in comparison. 'Day is dark to their
eyes, and under the clear sun they complain that the light has
disappeared.'

It was the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among heathen
writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, by
Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in
describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In
spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to
understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his
letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of
the fifth century. In Carm. 2 he draws a highly--coloured picture of
the home of Pontius Leontas,[31] a fine country property, and paints
the charms of the villa with all the art of his rhetoric and some
real appreciation. The meeting of the two rivers, the Garonne and the
Dordogne, in the introduction is poetically rendered, and he goes on
to describe the cool hall and grottos, state-rooms, pillars--above
all, the splendid view: 'There on the top of the fortress I sit down
and lean back and gaze at the mountains covered by olives, so dear to
the Muse and the goats. I shall wander in their shade, and believe
that coward Daphne grants me her love.' He delighted in unspoilt
Nature, and describes:

My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is
overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its wide circle. It
needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand
has touched it is its charm; it is no masterpiece of skill, no
hammer with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill
up the place where the tufa is worn away.

He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town
luxury and country solitude, in his second letter to Domidius, and
describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental
delight:

You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain
with more reason that you stay in the town when the earth shines
in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the
soil is marke