Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of his voice.  The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur, the hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks have their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in trembling whispers to the winds:  what time the light south-east falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the Gargaric grove.  Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its hiss, the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their note....  Have the Basque mountains and the snowy haunts of the Pyrenees taken away thy urbanity?...  May he, who advises thee to keep silence, never enjoy the singing of sweet songs nor the voices of Nature ... sad and in need may he live in desolate regions, and wander silent in the rounded heights of the Alpine range.

The sounds of Nature are detailed with great delicacy in this appeal, and we see that the Alps are referred to as desolate regions.

In another letter (25) he reminded his friend of their mutual love, their home at Burdigala, his country-house with its vine-slopes, fields, woods, etc., and went on: 

Yet without thee no year advanceth with grateful change of season; the rainy spring passeth without flower, the dog-star burns with blazing heat, Pomona bringeth not the changing scents of autumn, Aquarius pours forth his waters and saddens winter.  Pontius, dear heart, seest thou what thou hast done?

Closing in the same tender strain with a picture of his hope fulfilled: 

Now he leaves the snowy towns of the Iberians, now he holds the fields of the Tarbellians, now passeth he beneath the halls of Ebromagus, now he is gliding down the stream, and now he knocketh at thy door!  Can we believe it?  Or do they who love, fashion themselves dreams?

The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the correspondences between ‘beautiful souls’ in the eighteenth century.

Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, and in every way a man of fine and tender feeling.  He gave himself with zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop.

It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to Apollo.  There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake.  The one took the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen, with sympathy and sentiment in addition.

Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of solitude.  ’They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they love.’