margins. Above rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes
studded with bright villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards
above, while a crest of thick chestnut woods adorns the very
summit of the hills. Streams of snowy clearness dash from the
hill-sides into the lake. On the eastern side these unite to form
the river Addua, so called because it contains the added volume
of two streams.... So delightful a region makes men delicate and
averse to labour.... Therefore the inhabitants deserve special
consideration, and for this reason we wish them to enjoy
perpetually the royal bounty.

This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature,
even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude
was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in
wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater
stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants.

On _a priori_ grounds (so misleading in questions of this kind) one
would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the history of the
European people to have produced a Venantius Fortunatus, the greatest
and most celebrated poet of the sixth century. His whole personality,
as well as his poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and
Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then
among the Roman elegists and later epic poets that we meet a feeling
for Nature which can be compared to his. Like all the poets of this
late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon
the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new
expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the
last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon this one
beneficent figure. He was born in the district of Treviso near
Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before the great Lombard
invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig,
were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. In the midst of
this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the poets by virtue
of his talent and purity of character. His poems are often disfigured
by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but his keen eye for
men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for Nature shews not
only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with the inner life.

The lover's wish in _On Virginity_,[34] one of his longer poems,
sugges