Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus.  Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.

In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a second Caesar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden Age.

In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place.  At any rate, he described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same strong colouring, Paradise.

The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in the much-read Hortulus of Wahlafried.[40]

Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.

They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and vegetables, of the gardener’s pleasure in digging his fields in spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.

There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic—­for instance: 

A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.

and: 

With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent of Sabian woods?

He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand.  In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes.  In those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in mountain beauty.  There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for beautiful Reichenau.  But even he, like most of his predecessors and all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often failing to keep pace with thought.

It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at Pruen, who, in a postscript to the Conclusio des Martyrologium, gives a charming account of a landowner’s life in field, garden, and hunt.