Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool drinks.  At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in the soft kisses of the grass.

His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the Garonne and Gers (Egircius): 

So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly becomes a sea.

He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great satisfaction.

More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal scene-painting.  The best and most famous of these is on his journey by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine.  Here he shews a keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as for the minutiae of scenery, with artistic treatment.  He also blends his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her own sake.

He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle Ages—­the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman minds.

In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth and intensity.  His touching friendship with Radegunde is, as it were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the modern sprang.  It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of classic poetry into a flame.

Fortunatus stood upon a borderland.  Literature was retreating further and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its fall.  In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling.

It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were enthusiastically imitated.  Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.

It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding shallowness and lassitude.