26 COSMOS. 



to extol his native Colonos by placing the lofty form of the 

 fated and royal wanderer by the brink of the sleepless waters 

 of Cephisus, surrounded by soft and bright scenery. The re- 

 pose of nature heightens the impression of pain called forth by 

 the image of the noble form of the blind sufferer, the victim 

 of mysterious and fatal passion. Euripides* also delights, in 

 picturesque descriptions of" the pastures of Messenia and La- 

 conia, which, under an ever-mild sky, are refreshed by a thou- 

 sand fountains, and by the waters of the beautiful Pamisos." 



Bucolic poetry, which originated in the plains of Sicily, and 

 popularly inclined to the dramatic, has been justly termed a 

 transitional form. Its pastoral epics describe on a small scale 

 human beings rather than natural scenery ; and in this form 

 it appears in its greatest perfection in the writings of Theoc- 

 ritus. A soft elegiac element is peculiar to the idyl, as if it 

 had emanated from " the longing for some lost idea ;" as if, 

 in the breast of mankind, a certain touch of melancholy was 

 ever mingled with the deep feelings awakened by the aspect 

 of nature. 



True Hellenic poetry expired with the freedom of the 

 Greeks, and became descriptive, didactic, and instructive. As- 

 tronomy, geography, hunting, and fishing were converted, in 

 the time of Alexander, into objects of poetic consideration, and 

 often adorned with a remarkable degree of metrical skill. The 

 forms and habits of animals are depicted with grace, and not 

 unfrequently with such accuracy that the particular genera 

 or even species may be recognized by the classifying natural- 

 ist of the present day. x\ll these compositions are, however, 

 wholly wanting in that inner lile — that inspired contempla- 

 tion of nature — by which the external world becomes to the 

 poet, almost unconsciously to himself, a subject of his imagin- 



tive of a deep feeling of nature, I would here further mention the de- 

 scription of Cithseron in the Bac-chcB of Euripides, v. 1045 (Leake, North. 

 Greece, vol. ii., p. 370), where the messenger ascends from the Valley 

 of Asopus, the reference to the sunrise in the Valley of Delphos, in the 

 Ion of Euripides, v. 82, and the gloomy picture in the Hymn on Delos, 

 V. 11, by Callimachus, in which the holy Delos is represented as sur- 

 rounded by sea-gulls, and scourged by tempestuous waves. 



* According to Strabo (lib. viii., p. 366, Casaub.), who accuses the 

 tragedian of giving a geographically incorrect boundary to Blis. This 

 beautiful passage of Euripides occurs in the Cresphontes. The descrip- 

 tion of the excellence of the district of Messenia is intimately connected 

 with the exposition of its political relations, as, for instance, the division 

 of the land among the Heraclida?. The delineation of nature is, there- 

 fore, here too, a:s B5ckh ingeniously remarks, associated with human 

 interests. 



