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Omissions in the poems quoted are marked by small groups of full stops; a line of which indicates that the part omitted is of some length.

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FROM primaeval days it is impossible that man can have looked without interest, awe, and pleasure on the mysteriously alluring scene around him-mountains, rivers, plains, sea, sky: stars, moon, sun, their rising and setting. Nor could these great features of nature fail of being in some way represented, so soon as poetry and painting reached any true grasp of expression. Those so remote efforts, however, whatever they may have been, are lost; and centuries probably went by, before Palestine and Hellas gave us the earliest extant delightful examples of Landscape in Words. But the case was different with Landscape in Colours, in which scarce any relic has survived for some two thousand years after the probable date of the poems that have reached us under the awe-striking names of David and of Homer.

The first interest, then, which may be claimed for our subject is that, in its limited degree, poetry does enable us to feel how the book of Nature, with its many-coloured pages, affected the three gifted literary races of the Mediterranean world-Hebrew, Hellenic, Latin-during years when, if landscape art in some sense may have existed, the evidence of it has barely survived in a few crumbling Graeco-Roman frescoes. Literature (in which we must here include prose) has hence singly Landscape for her portion, broadly speaking, between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. After that date, more or less, first as a

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