I asked the earth, and she said:  ‘I am not He,’ and all things that are in her did confess the same.  I asked the sea and the depths and creeping things, and they answered:  ’We are not thy God, seek higher.’  I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer:  ’Anaxagoras was at fault, I am not God.’  I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim:  ‘He made us.’  My question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the beauty of their form.

In another place: 

Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love Thee.  But behold, sea and sky and all things in them from all sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give all men this message, so that they are without excuse.  Sky and earth speak to the deaf Thy praises:  when I love Thee, I love not beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace of my innermost soul.  That is what I love when I love my God.

Augustine’s interest in Nature was thus religious.  At the same time, the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to him.

The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, the poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the level of true poetry.

Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[22]

It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of original national material to serve as inspiration, as the AEneas Saga had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and describe scenery and travels.  Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests such an acute grasp of Nature’s little secret charms as the small poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by villas, and reflected in the crystal water below.  It seemed as if the Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song.

Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23]

Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus does not answer his letters: