_i_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN
LANDSCAPE
The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of the
beauty and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literary
imagination which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. It
is not an Italy in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's
_Bucolics_, but the Italy of Horace's own time, the Italy of his own
birth and experience, and the Italy of today. Horace is not a
descriptive poet. The reader will look in vain for nature-poems in the
modern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our vision
the beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy.
The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught his
eye, are those that we still see. There are the oak and the opaque ilex,
the pine and the poplar, the dark, funereal cypress, the bright flower
of the too-short-lived rose, and the sweet-scented bed of violets. There
are the olive groves of Venafrum. Most lovely of sights and most
beautiful of figures, there is the purple-clustered vine of vari-colored
autumn wedded to the elm. There is the bachelor plane-tree.
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