37

built, the country round was mostly either a barren wil derness, or a vast, impenetrable forest, and that, if things are otherwise now, the change is owing to the patient industry of the monks and their dependents, not liable to alternations and interruptions, as is the case with other proprietors, but continued without intermission through centuries. Though one is bound however to protest against this stale and vulgar scoff, I know not how we can imagine that the men, who, when half "the world lay before them, where to choose their place of rest,” pitcht their homes in spots surrounded by such surpassing grandeur and beauty, can have been without all sense for what they saw. Rather, in retiring from the world to worship God in solitude, did they seek out the most glorious and awful chambers in that earthly temple, which also is “not made with hands."

Add to this, that in every country, where there are national legends, they are always deeply and vividly imprest with a feeling of the magnificence or the loveliness in the midst of which they have arisen. Indeed they are often little else than the expression and outpouring of those feelings: and such primitive poetical legends will hardly be found, except in the bosom of a beautiful country, growing up in it, and pendent from it, almost like fruit from a tree. The powerful influence exercised by natural objects in giving shape and life to those forms in which the Imagination embodies the ideas of superhuman power, is finely illustrated by Wordsworth in one of the noblest passages of the Excursion: where he casts a glance over the workings of this principle in the mythologies of the Persians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, and the Greeks; shewing with what plastic power the imaginative love of Nature wedded and harmonized the dim conceptions of the mysteries which lie behind the curtain of the senses, with the objects by which it happened to be surrounded, incarnating the invisible in the visible, and impregnating the visible with the invisible. The same principle is of universal application. You may perceive

how it has operated in the traditions of the Highlands, of the Rhine, of Bohemia, of Sweden and Norway, in short of every country where poetry has been indigenous. As the poetry of the Asiatic nations may be termed the poetry of the sun, so the Edda is the poetry of ice. U.

I have been trying to shew, that, though a taste for the picturesque, as the very form of the word picturesque, which betrays its recent origin, implies, is a late growth, a kind of aftermath, in the mind of a people, which cannot arise until a nation has gone through a long process of intellectual culture, nor indeed until after the first crop has been gathered in, still a feeling and love for the beauties of Nature may exist altogether independently of that self-conscious, self-analysing taste, and that such a feeling is sure to spring up, wherever there is nourishment for it, in a nation's vernal prime: although there may be a period, between the first crop and the aftermath, when the field looks parcht and yellow and bristly, and as if the dew of heaven could not moisten it. When the mind of a people first awakes, it is full of its morning dreams, and holds those dreams to be, as the proverb accounts them, true. A long time passes,- it must encounter and struggle with opposition,—before it acquires anything like a clear, definite self-consciousness. For a long time it scarcely regards itself as separate from Nature. It lies in her arms, and feeds at her breast, and looks up into her face, and smiles at her smiles. When it speaks, you rather hear the voice of Nature speaking through it, than any distinct voice of its own. It is like a child, in all whose words and thoughts you may perceive the promptings of its mother. Very probably indeed it may not talk much about its love for its mother: but it will give the strongest proofs of that love, by thinking in all things as its mother thinks, and speaking as its mother speaks, and doing as its mothe does.

This is the character of poetry in early times. It may be objected that you find no picturesque descriptions in

it. That is to say, the poets have not learnt to look at Nature with the eye of a painter, nor to seek for secondary, reflex beauties in natural objects, arising whether from symbolical, or from accidental associations. Nor do you see their love of Nature from their talking about nature: for they are not conversant with abstractions; they deal only with persons and things. You may discern that love however by the way in which it is mixt up with the whole substance of their minds, as the glow of health mixes itself up with the whole substance of our bodies, unthought of, it may be, until we are reminded of it by its opposite, but still felt and enjoyed.

Of Asiatic poetry it is needless to speak: for that even now has hardly emerged from its nonage, or risen beyond a child's fondness for flowers. But even in Homer,although in Greek poetry afterward the human element, that which treats of man as being and doing and suffering, predominated more than in the poetry of any other country over the natural, which dwells on the contemplation of the outward world, its forms, its changes, and its influences, and though the germs of this are to be found in the living energy and definiteness and bodiliness of all Homer's characters,—still what a love of Nature is there in him! What a fresh morning air breathes through those twin firstbirths of Poetry! what a clear bright sky hangs above those two lofty peaks of Parnassus! In his own words we may say, that over them ὑπεῤῥάγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ. Indeed this oneтos aierp may be regarded as the peculiar atmosphere of Greek literature and art, an atmosphere which then first opened and broke upon it. Of all poems the Homeric have the most thoroughly out-of-door character. We stand on the Ionian coast, looking out upon the sea, and beholding it under every variety of hue and form and aspect. And there he too was wont to stand; there, as Coleridge so melodiously expresses it, he

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

Every epithet he gives to a natural object, every image

taken from one, has the liveliest truth: and truth is ever the best proof that any one can give of love. Of the poetical descriptions of morning composed since the days of Homer, the chief part are little else than expansions and amplifications of his three sweet epithets, ήριγένεια, κροκόπεπλος, and ῥοδοδάκτυλος. Nor can anything be more aptly chosen than his adjuncts and accompaniments: which shews that he was not destitute of what we call the sentimental love of Nature, that love of Nature which discerns a correspondence, and as it were a sympathy, between its appearances and changes, and the vicissitudes of human feeling and passion. Chryses, after his entreaties have been denied, walks ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης, where the murmur of its waves responds to his feelings, and stirs him to pour them forth in a prayer to Apollo. In like manner Achilles, when Briseis is taken from him, sits apart by himself, θῖν ̓ ἔφ' ἑλος πολιῆς ὁρόων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα TOVTOV. The epithet ovora, denoting the dark gloom, perhaps the purple grape-colour of the distant sea, while it was dashing and foaming at his feet, brings it into harmony and sympathy with Achilles. A bright, blue sea would have been out of keeping. Or take a couple of similies. When Apollo comes down from Olympus to avenge his insulted priest, he comes vuкrì oikos. When Thetis rises from the sea to listen to her son's complaint, she rises r' ouíxλŋ. Parallels to these two similies may be found in two of our own greatest poets. Milton says that Pandemonium "Rose like an exhalation from the earth." Coleridge's Ancient Mariner tells us that he passes "like Night from land to land." Milton's image is a fine one. Coleridge's appears to me, to adopt an expression which he uses in speaking of Wordsworth's faults, "too great for the subject," a piece of "mental bombast." Be this however as it may, how inferior are they both, in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty, in grace, to the Homeric! which moreover have better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does come with the power and majesty, and with the terrours of

Night; and the soft waviness of an exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the goddess, than for the massiness and hard, stiff outline of a building. In Homer's landscapes, it is true, there is a want, or rather an absence, of those ornamental, picturesque epithets, with which Pope has bedizened his translation. This however only shews that the objects he speaks of "had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye." Such as they are, he loves them for their own sake. In his vivid, transparent verse, é§épavev nãoai σκοπιαὶ καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι, Καὶ νάπαι,—Παντὰ δέ τ ̓ εἴδεται åøтpа. We feel too that he, as he says of his shepherd, γέγηθε φρένα at the sight; though no "conscious swain," as Pope styles him, nor thinking of "blessing the useful light," as by a kind of second sight of utilitarianism the bard of Twickenham is pleased to make him.

This distinctness of the Homeric descriptions leads Cicero, in a fine passage of the Tusculan Questions, to contend that he who, though blind, could so represent every object as to enable us to see what he himself could not see, must have derived great pleasure and enjoyment from his inward sight. There is more reason however in the witticisms of Velleius, that, if any one supposes Homer to have been born blind, he must himself be destitute of every sense. For never was a fable more repugnant to truth, than that of Homer's blindness. It originated probably in the identification of the author of the Iliad with the author of the Hymn to Apollo, and was then fostered by the notion that Homer designed to represent himself under the character of Demodocus in the Odyssee. Milton has indeed made a fine use of Homer's blindness: but, looking at it as a fact, one might as reasonably believe that the sun is blind, as that Homer was.

In the Greek poets of the great age, I have already admitted, there is little love of Nature. Man was then become very nearly all-in-all, to whose level the gods themselves were brought down,-not the skeleton man of philosophy, nor the puppet of empirical observation,—but