Nature, the most common are those on the delight of summer, rustling
breezes and cold springs and rest under the shadow of trees. In the
ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a grassy
brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine;
or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is
lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone
of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating
down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim
green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the
sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country
holiday on strewn willow-boughs with wine and music,[3] as in that
most perfect example of the poetry of a summer day, the /Thalysia/ of
Theocritus. Down to a late Byzantine period this form of poetry, the
nearest approach to pure description of nature in the old world,
remained alive; as in the picture drawn by Arabius of the view from a
villa on the shore of the Propontis, with its gardens set between wood
and sea, where the warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of
the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called,
remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of
Mnasalcas,[5] the low shore with its bright surf, and the temple with
its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of
Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with
the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such
epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects for
their own sake, for the mere delight in observing and speaking about
them. Perhaps the nearest approach that Greek poetry makes to this is
in a remarkable fragment of Sophocles,[7] describing the shiver that
runs through the leaves of a poplar when all the other trees stand
silent and motionless.