bservans nido implumes detraxit: at illa
flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen
integrat et maestis late loca questibus implet;

the cattle smitten by the plague,[873] the migrating birds coming in
from the sea,[874] and many another tender touch, all show us the
feeling of which I am speaking; for he who could so feel towards animals
must needs have a soul of pity for man. So, too, with the inanimate
nature of Italy; the land in which Virgil's shepherds and husbandmen
live and work is one full of such detailed loveliness as might suggest a
beneficent Power presiding over it all, inviting man to lift up his
heart in gratitude or prayer. As Sellar has well remarked,[875] the
sense of natural beauty is in the _Georgics_ intertwined with the toil
of man, raising, as it were, the toiler to a higher level of humanity as
he lifts his eyes from his work. And this natural beauty is made real
for the reader by the life and force that everywhere pervades it; all
nature is alive and full of feeling; the fruit trees, for example, in
the second _Georgic_ seem instinct with an almost human life.[876] The
moment this comes home to us we see how it harmonises with all we have
learnt of the old Italian conception of the divine, of the forceful
_numina_ working for man's benefit if properly propitiated. And even
when Virgil is using the language of the Stoics to explain the life of
nature, we feel that behind the philosophical theory there lies this
feeling of the Italian:

deum namque ire per omnes
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum:
hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum.[877]

This is the religious spirit of the _Georgics_; the divine forces are
everywhere, and a man must submit himself to them and seek their aid. He
finds his true resource rather in prayer than in philosophy, his part in
the world is "laborare et orare." The hard lot of the Hesiodic labourer
is not that of the _agricola_ of the _Georgics_, who carries on his
campaign of toil with a cheerful heart and a clear conscience, for he is
in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the life around
him.

This, then, so far as I can describe it without going too far into
detail, is the feeling, the _religio_, which was needed in the Italy of
that day. We may, perhaps, venture to compare its revival in the work of
Virgil with the return to nature in the English poetry of a century ago,
which also brought with