But this rich vein of song,

"for season of rains is at hand." 1 with whatever treasures are lying hid from us, like gold within the rock, in all that Persia, Arabia, China, may also preserve, must be here passed by; in Pindar's phrase, they "speak only to the wise." And we shall afterwards have to notice other inevitable omissions.

The subject, even when limited, has thus far, I believe, been but briefly handled; I might almost repeat with that deep-souled and prophetic bard who did most for Roman nature-scenes, "the pathless places of poetry are our wandering ground," Avia Pieridum peragro loca. But it is in no spirit of boasting that this is noted; the fact is rather a source of anxiety, an appeal to the reader for a judgment, lenient if not favourable, of an attempt which cannot escape frequent deficiencies.

Although Landscape in Poetry has not hitherto, so far as my knowledge goes, at least in our language, been so much as mapped out systematically, yet I have been greatly aided by certain previous essays. Most important of these is the sketch (which does not exclude landscapes in prose or in colour) by that many-sided man of science, Alexander von Humboldt, in Cosmos, his great Physical Description of the Universe. Another and a more detailed survey is given in the volume of lectures by my gifted predecessor at Oxford, J. C. Shairp: 2 but it is chiefly our own poets who here are analysed; the series, perhaps rather arbitrarily selected, ending with Wordsworth. Briefer, but with more variety in range, is an outline prefixed to Mr. J. Gilbert's excellent and carefully illustrated volume, Landscape in Art before Claude and Salvator.3 And a very few but well chosen poets have been similarly treated in Mr. P. G. Hamerton's Landscape. In case of Greek and Roman literature I am

1 Cosmos, Part II: The authorised translation, edited by E. Sabine, 1849, has here been used.

2 The Poetic Interpretation of Nature. Edinburgh, 1877.

3 Murray, 1885. This very interesting work shows wide study and refined taste. By aid of illuminations and the backgrounds in early painting it traces landscape from classical art onwards, thus covering ground untouched by any other book I have met with. It deserves to be better known.

4 1885.

2

also indebted much to the work of two friends, W. Y. Sellar's admirable monographs on Lucretius and Vergil,1 J. W. Mackail's select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, and his brilliant Latin Literature.3 Other sources of aid will be named as they Occur. And there will be more such than I can notice or remember.

It is hardly needful to say that Nature, as here spoken of, falls short of the large sense in which Marcus Aurelius used the word :-"O Nature, from thee are all things, in thee are "all things, to thee all things return;" nor do we speak of that personification in J. S. Mills' phrase as "a collective 66 name for everything that is," or as including "not only "all that happens, but all that is capable of happening." Compared with Nature in her infinite vastness, her infinite minuteness, our sphere is indeed limited. It is the surface of this little world 4-or, indeed only a small part of that surface with sky and its earthborn features, and beyond, the heavenly bodies, as the fine old phrase names them, with which we are concerned; yet the aspects of Nature to man as he sees and loves and strives to render them in poetry, from the beginning we shall find have constantly either expressed or implied the sense of Divine causation or presence; and with this, that mysterious sense that we also are in some way one with what we see; that silent voices are speaking to us from land and sky, even that whatever we find of real existence, of the hyperphenomenal (if I may use the word) in ourselves, is immanent throughout the Cosmos. Or (to quote from an eminently thoughtful writer 5) man's personifications of natural 1 Published by the Clarendon Press.

3 Murray, 1895. These four last-named volumes, uniting scholarly thoroughness of treatment with fine taste and enthusiastic love of poetry, have a charm and a value comparatively unfrequent in literature of this class. They exhibit classical study less as a means than as an end, opening to us the innermost spirit of poetry, the secret chambers of the heart, by the master-key of sound scholarship-Literae Humaniores, in the highest sense of the words. 4 Compare Dante, looking back from the Starry Heaven

Vidi questo globo

Tal, ch' io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante.

5 Duke of Argyll, The Philosophy of Belief, 1896.

Par. xxii, 134.

66

66

scenery, we may say, are "not the result of any mere ignorant fancy by which we project ourselves into external Nature, but evidently the result of an instinctive recognition of that special kind of agency which is, indeed, familiarly known to us as existing within ourselves, but which is also universally "recognised and identified as existing outside of us and around ❝us, on every side. It is a reflection of that infinite Reason, "that Logos-of which we partake, and without which in "Nature was not anything made that was made. All things,

"including ourselves, are full of it."

It is not meant that these larger thoughts have been always -perhaps have been often-within the direct consciousness of poets in their landscape. Yet the sense (to sum up this argument) of the purpose infused through "everything that is," from the adjustment of sun and planets to the smallest function microscopically traceable in plant and animal structure—in one word, the sense of the unity of Nature, rendered in terms appropriate to each age as it passes; these have been deep underlying principles, a secret inspiration from the first, in the unsophisticated human mind and heart, and should always be kept in view through our survey from Homer to Tennyson.

Hence in many different modes it is that landscape appears in poetry; the soul of Nature has spoken to man with all her vast in the epithet which Shelley took from Lucretius, her "daedal "-fullness. Some of these modes it will be best to define briefly. The task is indeed difficult; indulgence is besought for it, as a mere sketch-map for the wide regions we have to traverse.

Four or five main aspects of Nature taken by man's mind in poetry may suffice. These can be ranged broadly from simple to complex, forming a development which, at the same time, answers more or less to the order of date. But it should always be remembered that art is free, that the poets especially do not always confine themselves to a single mode of treatment; that human nature itself remains, as Thucydides long since said, much the same throughout. The new is latent in the old, the old breathes forth through the new. Hence the various aspects of landscape in which Nature

offers herself never wholly disappear from poetry; they revive, or they melt into one another, defeating the effort to range them under definite classes or in sharply separated periods.

I We may first name the simple, almost physical, delight in the scenes of the home landscape, which seized especially on the early poets of Greece and the Middle Ages. Objects were painted singly and with a few clear touches; the meadow in spring, the living stream, the cool sheltering wood, the flower at their feet, as we always see with children, appear to limit their horizon. Poetry in this phase, in truth, but sets to song the cry of delight when infant eyes open on the cowslip field; and early as the style began, it repeats itself ever and anon, in Wordsworth's phrase, "Where life is wise and innocent."

II Even, however, in the earliest days of surviving poetry, from Homer himself, landscape, taking also a wider range, appears as the background to human life—as scenery to the play. It is thus by snatches and side glimpses that Nature, as a rule, is seen in the poetry of Greece, epic or lyric. Here we find a close analogy between painting and poetry, and this primitive mode in verse has been truly likened to the exquisitely imaginative fragments of landscape which delight us in the figuresubjects of the old Italian and Flemish artists, before landscape. as such was dealt with as by itself sufficient.

III In classical poetry, however, the range gradually widens. Civilisation and the life in cities threw then, as they throw now, the sensitive soul upon the pure charm of Nature, whilst Nature, through roads and resting-places, became everywhere more accessible. Philosophy-conscious thought upon thought-compels man to ask the origin and the meaning of the visible world. Nature, as the immediate work, and in some sense the expression of the Divine, is rendered by Hebrew poetry; as a vast vague power appears distinctly with Lucretius. Deep interest in the landscape, a certain passion for it as such, sympathy with Nature, make themselves heard in Roman song; landscape now at once contrasts with, and supports humanity.

IV Presently the Hebrew and the Roman sentiment are united and expanded by Christianity so vastly that poetry hence

forth prepares to be penetrated by what one may call the modern spirit. And the popular recognition of this change, this development, is well founded, despite the attempts which began with the Italian Renaissance to renew the classical spirit. Neo-paganism is a hollow theatrical mask; the old world, broadly speaking, does differ widely from the modern. Greek, Latin, Hebrew poetry alike think of Nature as subordinate in interest, or as external to man. But the long interval of European dislocation and reconstruction now intervenes; more than six centuries, during which light struggles with darkness and barbarism, must be overleapt before the modern world-the mediaeval-modern perhaps one might name it—was born; before Poetry lifted her voice to charm and to comfort mankind again.

The horizon henceforth was immensely enlarged; at first seen only from the valley just as it lies about us, the landscape is now studied, as it were, from the mountain top. Religion, Man, Nature, these permanent elements of the landscape in poetry, wrought upon by mediaeval thought, by the Renaissance, by our own modern atmosphere, so largely tinged by physical science, have given rise to certain deeper, more intimate, relations between Nature and the soul. "Mellower years," in Wordsworth's phrase, “brought a riper mind, And clearer "insight." Landscape now appears as matter of pure description, human interests being subordinate, like the figures introduced in the work of painters from Claude to our own time. With this also, in a kind of contrast, poetry devoted to regions or spots of historical interest may be named. This latter form, however, leads naturally to didactic treatment; and the danger of hence declining into prosaic style has rendered it comparatively infrequent.

More distinctly modern is the attempt to penetrate the inner soul of the landscape itself; drawing from it moral lessons or parables for encouragement, or, indeed, for warning, when before the poet's mind is the unsympathetic aspect of Nature, her merciless indifference to human life. Under another conception the landscape becomes a symbol of underlying spiritual truths. Or again, it is, as it were, clothed in