se of the Creator, their constant outdoor
work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of
the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the
nobler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and
hermitages fully bears out this view.[37]

_The Conflict between Spring and Winter_, with its classic
suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[38] It
described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass
clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly
in the red-gold butcher's broom, captivating us with her changing
melodies.

Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert.
Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of
Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a
vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and
the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy
meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the
thicket stocked with many kinds of game.

At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of
courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful
romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful
women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or
glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the
asceticism of the poetry of the saints.'

Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for
his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus.
Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.

In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man
draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and
the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs
the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and
at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a
second Caesar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden
Age.

In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature,
Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he
described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some
humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a
light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same
strong colouring, Paradise.

The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated