44 COSMOS. 



peatedly expressed, that the love of nature evinced by northern 

 nations is to be referred to an innate longing for the pleasant 

 fields of Italy and Greece, and for the w^onderful luxuriance 

 of tropical vegetation, when contrasted with their own pro- 

 longed deprivation of the enjoyment of nature during the 

 dreary season of winter. We do not deny that this longing 

 for the land of palms diminishes as we approach Southern 

 France or the Spanish peninsula, but the now generally adopt- 

 ed and ethnologically correct term of Indo- Germanic nations 

 should remind us that too general an influence ought not to 

 be ascribed to northern winters. The luxuriant poetic litera- 

 ture of the Indians teaches us that within and near the trop- 

 ics, south of the chain of the Himalaya, ever- verdant and ev- 

 er-blooming forests have at all times powerfully excited the 

 imaginations of the East Arian nations, and that they have 

 always been more inclined toward poetic delineations of nature 

 than the true Germanic races who have spread themselves 

 over the inhospitable north as far as Iceland. The happier 

 climates of Southern Asia are not, hoAvever, exempt from a 

 certain deprivation, or, at least, an interruption of the enjoy- 

 ment of nature ; for the seasons are abruptly divided from 

 each other by an alternation of fructifying rain and arid de- 

 structive drought. In the West Arian plateaux of Persia, 

 the barren wilderness penetrates in many parts in the form 

 of bays into the surrounding highly fruitful lands. A margin 

 of forest land often constitutes the boundary of these far-ex- 

 tending seas of steppe in Central and Western Asia. In this 

 manner the relations of the soil present the inhabitants of these 

 torrid regions with the same contrast of barrenness and veg- 

 etable abundance in a horizontal plane as is manifested in a 

 vertical direction by the snow-covered mountain chains of In- 

 dia and of Afghanistan. Great contrasts in seasons, vegeta- 

 tion, and elevation are always found to be exciting elements 

 of poetic fancy, where an animated love for the contemplation 

 of nature is closely interwoven with the mental culture and 

 the religious aspirations of a people. 



Pleasure in the contemplation of nature, which is consonant 

 with the characteristic bent of mind of the Germanic nations, 

 is in the highest degree apparent in the' earliest poems of the 

 Middle Ages, as may be proved by many examples from the 

 chivalric poetry of the Minnesingers, in the period of the Ho- 

 henstaufien dynasty. However numerous may be the histor- 

 ical points of contact connecting it with the romanesque songs 

 of the Provenfals, we can not overlook the genuine Germanic 



