thy door! Can we believe it? Or do they who love, fashion
themselves dreams?

The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic
times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the
correspondences between 'beautiful souls' in the eighteenth century.

Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, and
in every way a man of fine and tender feeling. He gave himself with
zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop.

It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen
when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to
Apollo. There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he
did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake. The one took
the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen,
with sympathy and sentiment in addition.

Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of
solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness
that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their
eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure
that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they
love.'

In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in which
he was living, and many copious descriptions of time and place run
through his other writings[24]; but while he yielded nothing to
Ausonius in the matter of friendship, 'sooner shall life disappear
from my body than thy image from my heart,' he was without his quiet
musing delight in Nature. For her the heathen had the clearer eye and
warmer heart; the Christian bishop only acknowledged her existence in
relation to his Creator, declaring with pride that no power had been
given to us over the elements, nor to them over us, and that not from
the stars but from our own hearts come the hindrances to virtue.

Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were the
principal themes of the Christian poets of the fourth and fifth
centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of
Robinson Crusoe romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in
connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the beauty of
Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of
Paradise with much self-satisfaction.

Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the
heavens, beating the air with sounding wings, various notes do