ere were gross elements: among the many recurring festivals,
some were gross and saturnalian enough. The Romans kept near
Nature, in which are, both animal and cleansing forces; but
the high old _gravitas_ was the virtue they loved. And supposing
Numa established their religion, it does not follow that he
established what there came to be of grossness in it.

They kept near Nature; very near the land, and the Earth Breath,
and the Earth Divinities, and the Italian soil,--and that
southern laya center and gateway into the inner world which,
I am persuaded, is in Italy. There are many didactic poems in
world-literature,--poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;--
and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for
their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry.
That one is the Roman one. Its author was a Celt, and his models
were Greek; and he was rather a patient imitative artist than
greatly original and creative;--but he wrote for Rome, and with
the Italian soil and weather for his inspiration; and their
forces pouring through him made his didactics poetry, and poetry
they remain after nineteen centuries. Nothing of the kind comes
from Greece. As if whenever you broke the Italian soil, a voice
sang up to you from it: _Once Saturn reigned in Italy!_

It is this that brings Cincinnatus back to his cabbage-field from
the war,--and politics, as to something sacred, a fountain at
which life may be renewed. Plug souls; no poetry in them;--but
the Earth Breath cleanses and heals and satisfies them. In place
of a literature, they have wild unpoetical chants to their Mayors
to raise as they go into battle; for art and culture, they have
that bright vermilion Jove; nothing from the Spirit to comfort
them in these! But put the ex-dictator to hoe his turnips, and
he is in a dumb sort of way in communication at once with the
Spirit and all deepest sources of comfort.--What is Samnite gold
to me, when I have my own radishes to toast,--sacred things out
of my own sacred soil? The Italian sun shines down on me, and
warms more than my physicality and limbs. See, I strike my hoe
into Italy, and the sacred essences of Earth our Mother flow up
to me, and quiet my mind from anxious and wasting thought, and
fill me with calmness and vigor and Italy, and her old quaint
immemorial gods!

Not that the Roman had any conception, patriotically speaking,
about Italy; it was simply the soil he wa