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The woods and mountains 'Ah, Adonis!' sigh,
The rivers moan to Venus' agony,

The mountain springs all trickle into tears,
The blush of grief on every flower appears;

And Venus o'er each solitary hill,

And through wide cities chants her dirges shrill." *

Here woods and mountains, streams and flowers are beautifully invested with sympathy in the wild grief of the goddess for her lost lover, but there is no trace of individuality in their action, no personal attribute distinguishing any one component element of nature from the others. They, like the Dryads and Fauns which personate them, are bodies without souls, physically analogous to man, devoid of super-sensual attributes. We will further extract from the "Monody on the death of Bion," by his friend Moschus, a poem as full of feeling and imagery as any which antiquity has left us.

"Ye woods, with grief your waving summits bow;

Ye Dorian fountains, murmur as ye flow;

From weeping urns your copious sorrows shed,
And bid the rivers mourn for Bion dead.
Ye shady groves, in robes of sable hue
Bewail; ye plants, in pearly drops of dew;
Ye drooping flowers, diffuse a languid breath,
And die with sorrow at sweet Bion's death;
Ye roses, change from red to sickly pale,
And all ye bright anemones bewail."

And so he continues with pages of such sweet singing, yet never rises above the direct aspects of nature. He nowhere descends and grasps the personality, the individual sentiment of any feature of nature. The waters, the hills, the groves, the flowers, are taken in mass, or only individualized by the visible feature of color; and, as in the preceding instance, their only evidence of life is to weep, to moan and to turn pale.

If we turn now to modern verse, a new spirit is speedily manifest. The parts of nature are individualized, each has its distinct mode of feeling, its personal attributes, its special sentiment and character in the intricate drama of life. We

*Mill's Greek Poets, page 215.

† Greek Poets, p. 220.

will extract an elegiac verse from Milton, a poet not wholly broken loose from the pagan sentiment of his classic models, whose cosmogony is half mythological, but who in his shorter poems is instinct with a sentiment alien to the Greek.

"Bring the rath primrose that, forsaken, dies,
The tufted crowtoe and pale jessamine,

The white pink and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk rose and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

Bid daffodillies fill their cups with tears

To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies."*

There is no casting the eyes at random over nature, catching at a glance the physical features of the fields, streams, and mountains, and describing only these salient analogies to hu manity. Nor is it a scientific investigation of the particular features of nature, but rather the loving research of poetic eyes, and the instinctive grasp by the poetic mind of the innate features that give personality to every flower of the fields. In all Greek literature we will not find a line analogous in spirit to "the rath primrose that, forsaken, dies." Their poets never enter into this close communion with the members of nature's great family. They would see nothing in the primrose beyond its color and the shape of its leaves.

Descending to more modern times we will extract from the fine elegy of Shelly on the death of Keats, a poem, in its whole, utterly alien to the spirit of Hellenic verse, and which no Greek bard could either have written or have comprehended, We will take here, as in the preceding instances, an apostrophe

to nature:

He lives! he wakes!-'tis Death is dead, not he!
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou, young dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to mourn!

Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains! and thou, air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown

O'er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!"+

*Milton's Lycidas.

+ Shelly's Adonais, v.,

41.

The invocation here is not to grieve, but to cease mourning, for in his passing away death has been conquered, and a higher life, the disembodied existence of the soul, has succeeded the gross imperfection and animality of the earthly life. In these verses burns a spirit of aspiring thought, of extra-mundane idea, which widely informs modern poetry, but fails to illumine the pages of the ancient bards. The warsongs of Homer, the wine-songs of Anacreon, the love-songs of Sappho, the Idylliums of Bion and Moschus, the dramas of Sophocles and Eschylus are alike built on a sensuous plane. They show us nothing of the spirit instinct in the flesh, of the soul that burns through the sense. To them the world is a The poetic

mighty appearance, the universe a vast exterior.
remains of Greece appear like the ruins of its sculpture--

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But the modern poet has ceased to regard form as the allessential ingredient of art. The spirit of modern poetry is like the genius of the Arabian fisherman escaping from the open casket of verse in gliding mist from the eyes of its uncultured possessor, but to eyes of deeper vision gathering into majestic and sublime figures, all whose strength and beauty no eye can fathom.

We will conclude with a consideration of that phase of human thought in which its mental status is most plainly realized the conception of Deity. Nowhere does a nation reach so deeply into the kingdom of the unknown as in its search for a God; and truly, in comparing national powers of abstract thought, "By their gods ye shall know them." This consideration, in the Christian world, lifts us out of the realm of art. The hand of no artist has a reach capable of grasping the least attribute of the Deity. The finite can nowhere embrace the infinite, and every effort to render the Godhead conceivable, as in Paradise Lost, must end in utter failure.

But the Grecian deity was fully within the reach of art,

*Sidney Dobell's Poems.

and forms the highest subject to which their art has applied itself. For even in this phase the thought of Greece was based upon the physical plane. We speak not now of the conceptions of her few mighty men of thought who had broken loose from the bondage of mythology and projected their ideas far beyond the common grasp, but of the people taken as a whole.

Of the multitudinous divinities, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, with which this form-loving race peopled the universe -and truly they were liberal enough in their distributionnot one stood above man's possibilities in nature or character. They were but invisible men and women, with all our virtues and all our faults, and gravitated so heavily to earth that only the firm plateau of a mountain summit was able to support the mighty burden of their celestial court.

Zeus, the king of Heaven, and their loftiest conception of Deity, passed life like some sensual eastern monarch. Yet, whatever their few minds of deep insight may have conceived of a superior Deity, it was this being that the race, as a whole, worshipped-the loftiest figure in their pantheon, the controller by brute force of the turbulent family that loved and squabbled upon Olympus.*

Indeed, in some of his adventures, he may seem to stand at a lower level than any but men of debased minds, but such adventures were both credible and creditable in the Greek cities, and Grecian society, in its sexual relations, stood at a level which would appear quite abominable to modern minds. Crimes to which we prefer to give no name were looked upon as venial faults of their great men.

The same facts hold good of all ancient mythologies; the adventures of their gods simply varying to suit the mental character of the people. Thus the love-tales of the Greek deities are replaced by combat and cunning in the Scandinavian myths. The most metaphysical conceptions of the early creed-makers speedily degenerated into similar anthropomor

*The Greek could not conceive a spirit. He could do nothing without limbs. His god is a finite being, a being of clay, strength and human passions."-Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 3, sec. ii., chap. V, § 20.

phic deities, and men built their gods out of the revealments of their senses. The ancient Hebrews are no exception to the rule. Whatever view their seers and prophets may have taken of the Deity, to the people at large he continued physically in their own image.

Christ first gave the world a juster image of the Almighty. The God of the New Testament is a Being vitally distinct from the deific revelation of any preceding religious work. But throughout the Middle Ages He continued to be worshipped under an anthropomorphic image, and is so to the great majority of the Christian world to this day. Only to the developed minds of the modern world has God left his kingdom of the concrete and retired into that depth of immutable abstraction which no human conception can enter, though men forever strain with throbbing souls to gain a glimpse of visible Deity in the universe.

Minds of the deepest critical acumen and of marvellous insight have searched the realm of the metaphysical, and have attained a depth of logical departure from the visible to which few can follow them. Yet, far beyond their utmost reach lies the divine mystery which they seek to unfold. The world moves on, reaching, craving, praying, but not attaining.

ART. VIII. Sketches of the Life and Labors of Horace Greeley. By the Daily Press.

Ir is seldom that the public expressions of grief which follow the demise of a distinguished character are a true exponent of the degree and quality of the feeling which his loss excites. We behold our great men from a distance; to most of us they are merely the idols of the day, filling an exalted position, and attended by a parade of circumstance, rather than fully apprehended personalities—natures with whom our own has come into contact. We can hardly be said to feel the loss of one, however high his position, between whom and us there has been no reciprocation of feeling. We may, indeed, in a certain sense, regret his

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