Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/268

Rh content as when I come back here under my olives. I suppose you cannot understand that?"

"I am not sure—yes, perhaps. One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.

"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan Court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus, Meleager, the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what is modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful, feeling which makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."

"But that is always a northern feeling?"

"Inevitably. With us Nature is too riante for us to grow morbid about it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the fruits that grow almost without culture, the