Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/288

 the way, was largely due to contact with popular life) was the true mission of that language which, as Heine says, "is the language of command for generals, of decree for administrators, an attorney language for usurers, a lapidary language for the stone-hard people of Rome"-"the appropriate language of materialism" which Christianity has "tormented itself for a thousand years in the vain attempt to spiritualise." Not even in Nature herself had the cultured Romans a refuge from the paralysing spectacle of Roman society. It is true that the Roman poets occasionally give us descriptions of Nature. Such, for example, is Vergil's picture of the gathering and bursting tempest in the first book of the Georgics; such is Ovid's description of the fountain on Mount Hymettus, or Lucan's sketch of the ruined Druidic forest in the third book of the Pharsalia. But the gloomy spectacle of slavery would seem to have checked the development of a truly imaginative Nature-poetry, and to have thrown back Roman genius on those scenes of social life in which the unsympathetic characters of Roman citizens were enough to freeze the most vigorous imagination.

Thus did the broken bonds of social sympathy, a disruption terribly confessed in Diocletian's famous edict on prices, and inevitably avenged by the disappearance of the Roman empire before barbarians who reintroduced the devotion of man to man, react upon the sentiment of Nature. If, as Professor Blackie has said so truly, the