in the height of heathen civilization it had never received adequate expression, both in Italy and in Greece, the eye of the believer was gradually opening to clearer and more worthy views of the creation. “Look upward,” says St. Chrysostom, "to the vault of heaven, and around thee on the open fields in which herds graze by the water-side; who does not despise all the creations of art, when, in the stillness of his spirit, he watches with admiration the rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when, resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring, or beneath the somber shade of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far-re ceding and hazy distance." Similar passages may also be gathered from the letters of St. Basil and St. Gregory,* fathers of the Greek Church. And still earlier instances of this Christian view of the earth are quoted from the writings of a Roman lawyer, Minucius Felix, who lived in the beginning of the third century; his evening rambles on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the neighborhood of Ostia, were very feelingly described in pages which have been preserved to our own time. The Christian Church possessed a most rich inheritance in the Hebrew literature; and the constant use of the Psalms of the Temple in her public services would alone suffice to produce in the minds of the people a deep impression of the goodness and majesty of the Divine Creator as revealed in his works. The Canticle of the Three Children, composed before the foundation of Rome, and which from the early ages of Christianity to the present hour has formed a portion of public worship, is an exalted offering of praise with which we are all familiar: "O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever!" And in the sublime anthem of the Te Deum we have another earnest, unceasing expression of a feeling inseparable from Christianity: "We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. Heaven and * Part XXVII. These translations have all been transcribed from M. de Humboldt's pages. earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!" It is, indeed, revealed truth only which has opened to the human mind views of the creation at all worthy of its dignity. It is from her teaching that we learn to appreciate justly the different works of the Deity, in their distinctive characters, to allot to each its own definite position. There is no confusion in her views. She shows us the earth, and the creatures which people it, in a clear light. She tells us positively that all things are but the works of His holy hands-the visible expression of an Almighty wisdom, and power, and love; and as she speaks, the idle phantoms of the human imagination, the puerile deities of the heathen world, the wretched fallacies of presumptuous philosophy vanish and flee away from the face of the earth, like the mists and shadows of night at the approach of the light of day. Not one of the thousand banners of idolatry, whether unfurled on the mountain-tops, or waving in the groves, or floating on the streams, but falls before her. She points out to man his own position, and that of all about him; he is lord of the earth and of all its creatures. The herb of the field, the trees of the wood, the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea-every living thing that moveth upon earth—all have been given into his hand-all are subject to his dominionall are the gifts of Jehovah. A But, ere time had enabled Christian civilization and its ennobling lessons to make any positive progress, or to produce any lasting impression on the character of general literature. the Empire was overwhelmed by races wholly barbarous. period of darkness and disorder ensued, during which the very art of writing seems to have been all but forgotten. A few rude, unfinished sketches were all that could be expected from such an age, and in these man himself would naturally engross the attention. In societies only half civilized, man, as an individual, must always fill a bolder and more prominent position than in those where order, and knowledge, and truth are more widely diffused; he has in such a state of things far greater power for evil over his fellows; every step becomes of immediate importance, for it is associated with a thousand perils ; every turn of private passion, unchecked by vital vigor of law. or religion, may work out a fatal tragedy, and consequently the individual, either as tyrant, or victim, or champion, excites unceasing fear and flattery, or pity and commiseration, or gratitude and admiration. Wild legends, now warlike, now religious in spirit, naturally belonged to those centuries. No doubt the birds of heaven sang, and the flowers of the field bloomed in those ages; but we have scanty record of their existence; the eye of man was fixed on darker objects; his ear was filled with fiercer sounds. Slowly, however, civilization and social order-those natural accessories of the Christian faith-were making progress; but the most striking efforts of reviving intelligence at this period did not assume the shape of letters. That latent poetical spirit, never wholly extinct in the human heart, sought for development during those ages through other channels. Under the hand of the religious architect, pious, though lamentably superstitious, the dignity of the forest was once more embodied in novel and imposing labors of art; scarce a fine effect of the branching woods which was not successfully repeated with great richness of detail in Gothic stone. The beauty of the vegetation, in its noblest forms, must have been deeply impressed on the hearts of the men who, with Teutonic patience, raised those magnificent piles. Every American familiar with the beautiful and varied effects of old forests of blended growth, where fir and pine cross their evergreen branches amid the lighter tracery of deciduous trees, may have often noted some single fir, rising tall and spire-like far above the lesser grove, into the light of sun and star; some similar evergreen, rooted in the soil of Europe, was doubtless the original of that most beautiful of Christian architectural forms, the church spire of the Middle Ages: "Preacher to the wise, Less'ning from earth her spiral honors rise, Till, as a spear-point rear'd, the topmost spray, * Camöens. It was about the time when those mediæval churches were rising from the towns of central Europe-slow in their stately growth as the forest whence their forms were drawn-that Troubadour and Trouvère, Minstrel and Minnesinger, began their wanderings in the same region; and amid the strange medley of human passion and religious superstition to which they gave utterance, some strains of great natural sweetness were heard. It was then that the returning cuckoo was greeted in England with song: "Sumer is ycumen in, Lhude sing cuccu!" It was then that merle and mavis, nightingale and lark, were saluted with responsive music by the listening poet; it was then that daisy and lily, la douce Marguerite and the Flower of Light, were so fondly cherished and so highly honored; it was then that the May-pole was raised in the castle court and on the village green, and that high and low, like Arcite, hurried a-field on May-day morning "for to fetch some grene." It was then, in short, that the blossoms and the fowls of Europe were first sung in the modern dialects of the people. Those old wandering minstrels, troubadour and minnesinger, were, in fact, the heralds of reviving letters; they struck the first sparks of national, indigenous literary feeling in its modern forms. It was from them that Petrarch and Dante learned to speak the language of the living, rather than that of the dead. It was from their example that those great poets took, what was then a very daring step, and, rejecting the Latin, chose their native language as a medium of compositions of the highest order. How they succeeded, the whole world knows; and among the writings of those great Italian masters there are very beautiful descriptive passages, a few of which, in the form of translations, may be found in the later pages of this volume.* Fortunately for all who speak the English tongue, Chau* See Parts XXIX. and XXX. cer, "the morning star" of British verse, as he has been hailed by Denham, followed in the track of the Italian poets ; the fountains of his inspiration flowed fresh and full from his native soil. How keenly alive was he to every detail of natural beauty in the green fields of England; to the sweetness and freshness of the opening daisy; of the growing grass; of the unfolding leaf, with its "glad, light green!" He was followed by others with the same happy instincts, and a love of nature was thus infused into the earliest literature of our language. All the great poets of the sixteenth, and those of the best years of the seventeenth centuries, were more or less under the influence of this spirit-Shakspeare, Jonson, Spenser, Drayton, the Fletchers, Milton, Cowley, Denham, Dryden, Walker, Herbert, Herrick. How long is the noble roll of names of that period, who have all contributed something to our wealth in this way! There came a moment, however, when a colder and more artificial style acquired in England the same influence which long proved so paralyzing in France, when poets were content to copy those who had preceded them; when they trod the London pavement and the coffeehouse floors much more frequently than the narrow paths about the fields. Mr. Wordsworth has remarked, that during a period of sixty years, between the publication of "Paradise Lost" and that of the "Seasons," all the poetry of England, with the exception of a passage or two, does not contain "a single new image of external nature." Poets were courtiers in those times, or they aimed at becoming so; they prided themselves upon a neatly turned compliment, upon a farfetched dedication; they were wits-they were pretty fellows about town; like Horace Walpole's lively old friend, Madame du Deffand, they could very conscientiously avow, “Je n'aime pas les plaisirs innocents!" Mr. Wordsworth dates the dawn of the modern era in poetry from the appearance of the "Seasons," which were first published in the year 1726. A single great work will no doubt often produce surprisingly general effects in the literary world, when the atmosphere is prepared for it. And such |