ip with Radegunde is, as it
were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the
modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic
princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of
classic poetry into a flame.

Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further
and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its
fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night
were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling.

It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its
great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were
enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon
recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its
help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object
of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.

It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding
shallowness and lassitude.

Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic.
Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning
the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin,
who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his
_Conflict between Winter and Spring_, as well as in many single
verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36]

His _Farewell to his Cell_ caught the idyllic tone very neatly:

Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!
Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!
Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,
Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,
To meditation oft my mind disposed.
Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs
In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread;
And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined,
Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide,
Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts,
And fragrant with the apple bending bough,
With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile;
While jubilant, along thy verdant glades
At dawn his melody each songster pours,
And to his God attunes the notes of praise.

These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired
many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens
and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world
with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental
feeling was worship and prai