Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic.  Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles ’concerning the existence of things,’ relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine’s time in his Conflict between Winter and Spring, as well as in many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36]

His Farewell to his Cell caught the idyllic tone very neatly: 

  Beloved cell, retirement’s sweet abode! 
  Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee! 
  Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,
  Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,
  To meditation oft my mind disposed. 
  Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs
  In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread;
  And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined,
  Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide,
  Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts,
  And fragrant with the apple bending bough,
  With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile;
  While jubilant, along thy verdant glades
  At dawn his melody each songster pours,
  And to his God attunes the notes of praise.

These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens and woods beyond—­a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings.  If their fundamental feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the nobler minds among them.  Their choice of sites for monasteries and hermitages fully bears out this view.[37]

The Conflict between Spring and Winter, with its classic suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[38] It described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly in the red-gold butcher’s broom, captivating us with her changing melodies.

Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert.  Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries.  With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and the Kaiser’s brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the thicket stocked with many kinds of game.

At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a ’thoughtful romantic inclination’ for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, ’lay far from the asceticism of the poetry of the saints.’