deeper.  Particularly in the second book the very blades of grass and tendrils of the vines seem to be sentient.  The grafted trees “behold with wonder” strange leaves and fruits growing from their stems, transplanted shoots “put off their wild-wood instincts,” the thirsting plant “lifts up its head” in gratitude when watered.  Our own generation, which was sedulously enticed into nature study by books crammed with the “pathetic fallacy,” has become suspicious of everything akin to “nature faking.”  It has learned that this device has been a trick employed by a crafty pedagogy for the sake of appealing to unimaginative children.  Vergil was probably far from being conscious of any such purpose.  As a Roman he simply gave expression to a mode of viewing nature that still seemed natural to most Greeks and Romans.  The Roman farmer had not entirely outgrown his primitive animism.  When he said his prayers to the spirits of the groves, the fields, and the streams, he probably did not visualize these beings in human form; manifestations of life betokened spirits that produced life and growth.  Vergil’s phrases are the poetic expression of the animism of the unsophisticated rustic which at an earlier age had shaped the great nature myths.

And if Vergil had been questioned about his own faith he could well have found a consistent answer.  Though he had himself long ceased to pay homage to these animae, his philosophy, like that of Lucretius, also sought the life-principle in nature, though he sought that principle a step farther removed in the atom, the vitalized seeds of things, forever in motion, forever creating new combinations, and forever working the miracles of life by means of the energy with which they were themselves instinct.  The memorable lines on spring in the second book are cast into the form of old poetry, but the basis of them is Epicurean energism, as in Lucretius’ prooemium.  Vergil’s study of evolution had for him also united man and nature, making the romance of the Georgics possible; it had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him more complex and subtle.

Finally, the careful reader will discover in Vergil’s nature poetry a very modern attention to details such as we hardly expect to find before the nineteenth century.  Here again Vergil is Lucretius’ companion.  This habit was apparently a composite product.  The ingredients are the capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long occupation with deductive methods of philosophy,—­scientific pursuits have thus enriched modern poetry also—­and a sure aesthetic sense.  This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil’s commentators.  Conington, for example, has frequently done the poet an injustice by assuming that Vergil was in error whenever his statements seem not to accord with what