They kept near Nature; very near the land, and the Earth Breath, and the Earth Divinities, and the Italian soil,—­and that southern laya center and gateway into the inner world which, I am persuaded, is in Italy.  There are many didactic poems in world-literature,—­poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;—­ and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry.  That one is the Roman one.  Its author was a Celt, and his models were Greek; and he was rather a patient imitative artist than greatly original and creative;—­but he wrote for Rome, and with the Italian soil and weather for his inspiration; and their forces pouring through him made his didactics poetry, and poetry they remain after nineteen centuries.  Nothing of the kind comes from Greece.  As if whenever you broke the Italian soil, a voice sang up to you from it:  Once Saturn reigned in Italy!

It is this that brings Cincinnatus back to his cabbage-field from the war,—­and politics, as to something sacred, a fountain at which life may be renewed.  Plug souls; no poetry in them;—­but the Earth Breath cleanses and heals and satisfies them.  In place of a literature, they have wild unpoetical chants to their Mayors to raise as they go into battle; for art and culture, they have that bright vermilion Jove; nothing from the Spirit to comfort them in these!  But put the ex-dictator to hoe his turnips, and he is in a dumb sort of way in communication at once with the Spirit and all deepest sources of comfort.—­What is Samnite gold to me, when I have my own radishes to toast,—­sacred things out of my own sacred soil?  The Italian sun shines down on me, and warms more than my physicality and limbs.  See, I strike my hoe into Italy, and the sacred essences of Earth our Mother flow up to me, and quiet my mind from anxious and wasting thought, and fill me with calmness and vigor and Italy, and her old quaint immemorial gods!

Not that the Roman had any conception, patriotically speaking, about Italy; it was simply the soil he was after,—­which happened to be Italian.  Not for him, in the very slightest, Filicaia’s or Mazzini’s dream!  Good practical soul, what would he have done with dreaming?—­But he had his feet on the ground, and was soaked through, willy nilly, with its forces; he lived in touch with realities, with the seasons and the days and nights,—­how we do forget those great, simple, life-giving, cleansing things!—­and his mind was molded to what he owed to the soil, to the realities, to Dea Roma;—­and Duty became a great thing in his life.  Out of all this comes something that makes this narrow little cultureless bandit city almost sympathetic to us,—­and very largely indeed admirable.