FORERUNNERS 3 



witness, 1 and did space allow it would be easy to show a similar 

 tendency among the nations of Farther Asia, the Chinese, 

 Japanese, Tibetans, and Indians. But it is in ancient Greece, 

 where primitive man, outgrowing his childhood with a rapidity 

 unknown elsewhere, attained at a bound to a unique power of 

 self-expression, that we recognise the best example of this primi- 

 tive instinct in its highest development. The human mind abhors 

 a void. It personifies the forces of nature, finding in solitudes 

 a home for the supernatural ; peopling the uninhabitable with 

 creatures of its own fancy. The Greek enthroned the synod of 

 the gods upon the broad heights and serried crags of Olympus ; 

 Pan held the wooded spurs of Parnassus ; Apollo and the Muses 

 its twin peaks. The woods and the streams were the haunt 

 of a crowd of nymphs and fauns. 



Races further advanced in civilisation are found to take a 

 more practical and less poetical point of view. The characteristics 

 that impress them most in mountains are that they are difficult, 

 barren, inhospitable ; our own ancestors summed up their feelings 

 in a single word, ' horrid.' 2 This was the attitude habitually shown 

 in Roman literature. Not that there was any dislike or indiffer- 

 ence to all sorts of natural scenery in the days of Augustus, such 

 as there was in those of Louis Quatorze. The Roman citizen was 

 keenly interested in the features of the world he had conquered 

 and had to administer. Latin poetry is as crowded with place- 

 names as Milton's, and the singularly appropriate epithets as a 

 rule attached to each local feature show close and sympathetic 

 observation. But nature was valued chiefly as a background 

 and in so far as it contributed to human enjoyment ; it was shunned 

 from the moment when it began to add to the toils or dangers of 

 life. Virgil, Catullus, and the younger Pliny celebrated the 

 Italian lakes or the Etrurian highlands ; Horace his quiet nook in 

 the hills behind Tibur ; Ovid grew eloquent on the charms of his 

 birthplace, Sulmo, the remote hill-town surrounded by running 



1 In the seventeenth century ' Bible Mountains ' were made the subject of 

 a long rhymed poem entitled ' Ein lustig ernsthaf t poetisch Gastmal und Gespr&ch 

 zweyer Bergen, namlich des Niesens und Stockhorns ' (Berne, 1606), by a worthy 

 Swiss pastor named Rebmann. 



8 Horridus in Latin has a primary sense of ' bristling,' and is used of spears, 

 or woods, or crags. Narrow gorges in the neighbourhood of the Italian lakes 

 are locally known as Orridi. 



