, became famous in
the much-read _Hortulus_ of Wahlafried.[40]

Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and
pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful
observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.

They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and
vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in
spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up
by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and,
later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.

There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance:

A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it
has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the
breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end
of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.

and:

With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my
meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as
the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent
of Sabian woods?

He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the
shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick
the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand.
In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the
dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In
those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in
mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic
metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for
beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and
all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often
failing to keep pace with thought.

It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at
Pruen, who, in a postscript to the _Conclusio des Martyrologium_,
gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and
hunt.

In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a
quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and
classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the
sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the
Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout
admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius a