The descriptions of Nature too are, as a rule, not only slightly
sketched, but kept subordinate to a human relation. The brilliance and
loveliness of spring is the background for the picture of the sailor
again putting to sea, or the husbandman setting his plough at work in
the furrow; the summer woods are a resting-place for the hot and
thirsty traveller; the golden leaves of autumn thinning in the frosty
night, making haste to be gone before the storms of rough November,
are a frame for the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely
thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late
epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its
harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem
bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast
against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of
Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an
epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the
high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, contrasts with a
strangely modern feeling the perpetuity of nature and the return of
the works of spring with the brief life of man that ends once for all
on a cold winter night.[10]

Between the simply sensuous and the deep moral feeling for nature lies
the broad field of pastoral. This is not the place to enter into the
discussion of pastoral poetry; but it must be noted in passing that it
does not imply of necessity any deep love, and still less any close
observation, of nature. It looks on nature, as it looks on human life,
through a medium of art and sentiment; and its treatment of nature
depends less on the actual world around it than on the prevalent art
of the time. Greek art concentrated its efforts on the representation
of the human figure, and even there preferred the abstract form and
the rigid limitations of sculpture; and the poetry that saw, as it