It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of
original national material to serve as inspiration, as the Æneas Saga
had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and
describe scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests
such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the small
poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by
villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the
Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of
Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden
whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song.

Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we
learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather
and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23]

Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly
poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus
does not answer his letters:

Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking
against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of
his voice. The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur,
the hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks
have their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in
trembling whispers to the winds: what time the light south-east
falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the
Gargaric grove. Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the
air and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its
hiss, the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their