intimacy and fellowship with animate things that go deeper. Particularly
in the second book the very blades of grass and tendrils of the vines
seem to be sentient. The grafted trees "behold with wonder" strange
leaves and fruits growing from their stems, transplanted shoots "put off
their wild-wood instincts," the thirsting plant "lifts up its head" in
gratitude when watered. Our own generation, which was sedulously enticed
into nature study by books crammed with the "pathetic fallacy," has
become suspicious of everything akin to "nature faking." It has learned
that this device has been a trick employed by a crafty pedagogy for the
sake of appealing to unimaginative children. Vergil was probably far from
being conscious of any such purpose. As a Roman he simply gave expression
to a mode of viewing nature that still seemed natural to most Greeks and
Romans. The Roman farmer had not entirely outgrown his primitive animism.
When he said his prayers to the spirits of the groves, the fields, and
the streams, he probably did not visualize these beings in human form;
manifestations of life betokened spirits that produced life and growth.
Vergil's phrases are the poetic expression of the animism of the
unsophisticated rustic which at an earlier age had shaped the great
nature myths.

And if Vergil had been questioned about his own faith he could well have
found a consistent answer. Though he had himself long ceased to pay
homage to these _animae_, his philosophy, like that of Lucretius, also
sought the life-principle in nature, though he sought that principle a
step farther removed in the atom, the vitalized seeds of things, forever
in motion, forever creating new combinations, and forever working the
miracles of life by means of the energy with which they were themselves
instinct. The memorable lines on spring in the second book are cast into
the form of old poetry, but the basis of them is Epicurean energism, as
in Lucretius' prooemium. Vergil's study of evolution had for him also
united man and nature, making the romance of the _Georgics_ possible; it
had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the
language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him
more complex and subtle.

Finally, the careful reader will discover in Vergil's nature poetry a
very modern attention to details such as we hardly expect to find before
the nineteenth century. Here again Vergil is Lucretius' companion