same tone, elegiac and idyllic[5]; as
Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do
not shew the austerity of the cloister.'[6] The specifically
Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human.

Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild
dejection which longs for solitude. For instance, when Gregory had
been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in
reply, that peace of soul must be man's chief aim, and could only be
attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the
contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes
all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore he loved the quiet corner
where he was undisturbed by human intercourse.

He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to
wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and
shipwrecked beings, etc.

His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There is
a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here: 'A pleasant
sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but
pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes,
and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not
with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in
tranquil embrace.'[7]

There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound
religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the seasons,
etc. The expression of Ptolymaeos, that when he gazed at the stars he
felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in comparison with
Basil's words, 'If, on a clear night, you have fixed your gaze upon
the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to thoughts of the
artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has adorned the sky so
wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so planned it that
the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its conformity to
law....if the finite and perishable world is so beautiful, what must
the infinite and invisible be?'[8]

For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of eternity:
'If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, what
mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?'

Gregory Nazianzen's feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy. His
poem _On Human Nature_ says:

For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a
shady grove, gnawing my heart out. For somehow I love this