from the earth or the breezes from the river?  Other persons might admire the multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no time to attend to them.  But my highest eulogy of the spot is, that, prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy situation, it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of cities, but because it is not traversed by a single visitor except the hunters, who occasionally join us.  For, besides its other advantages, it also produces animals—­not bears and wolves, like yours—­heaven forbid!  But it feeds herds of stags, and of wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind.  Do you not then observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I was, to change such a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world?  I am now hastening to it, pardon me.  For even Alcmaeon, when he discovered the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.[3]

This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place quite as much for its repose, its idyllic solitude, for what we moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at once, as for its fertility and practical uses.  But it is too much to say, with Humboldt[4]: 

In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings are expressed which are more intimately in unison with those of modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from Greek or Roman antiquity.  From the lonely Alpine hut to which Basil withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof of the forest below....  The poetic and mythical allusion at the close of the letter falls on the Christian ear like an echo from another and earlier world.

The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic[5]; as Villemain says, ’These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do not shew the austerity of the cloister.’[6] The specifically Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human.

Other writings of Basil’s express still more strongly the mild dejection which longs for solitude.  For instance, when Gregory had been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in reply, that peace of soul must be man’s chief aim, and could only be attained by separation from the world, by solitude; ’for the contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes all insincerity and presumption.’  Therefore he loved the quiet corner where he was undisturbed by human intercourse.

He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature:  men were compared to wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and shipwrecked beings, etc.

His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature.  There is a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here:  ’A pleasant sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in tranquil embrace.’[7]