270 LANDSCAPE 



ocean. Naiads shrank from sight among fern-tufted fountains. 

 The evening star lured shepherds to his love, leaning in 

 twilight from the ridge of (Eta. The dawn, a rosy-fingered 

 damsel, left the couch of gray and shadowy Tithonus. The 

 sun-god stopped his steeds in mid-career at Hera's word, or 

 lent his flaming chariot to mortals for their ruin. The maiden 

 moon bent down at night to kiss her sweetheart in the solitude 

 of Latmos. 



Haunted by such conceptions, the poet and the artist could 

 not look on nature as we do. A multitude of fancy-fashioned 

 beings, with distinct characters and with legends of their own, 

 arose between his mind and the external world. Sculpture, 

 the dominant art of the race in its best period, gave substantial 

 shape to these creatures of myth-making imagination. When 

 utterance was sought in verse or in plastic symbolism for the 

 feelings stirred by landscape, all vagueness, all sense of the 

 infinite, which might peradventure have been present to 

 the artist's mind, slumbered there unexpressed and inarticu- 

 late. Graceful human forms emerged, and took their place in 

 the forefront of his vision. The rest was but a background, 

 blurred and indistinct. The sentiments belonging to it had 

 no opportunity of coming to self-consciousness. 



How widely and deeply this anthropomorphic sympathy 

 with nature penetrated the Hellenic imagination, and deter- 

 mined its poetical creativeness, may be seen in the legends of 

 metamorphosis. The reed by the river-margin had to be a 

 girl pursued by Pan. The cypress was a slender youth on 

 whom the wood-god doted. The pine, nodding to its fall 

 from some high precipice, had erewhile been a maiden rudely 

 clasped by the north wind. A daffodil reflected in the mirror 

 of a lakelet was Narcissus pining at the sight of his own 

 loveliness. Hyacinths, anemones, sunflowers, almond-blossoms, 

 crocuses all the ' children of the spring ' and ' nurslings 

 of the meadows,' as Chasremon called them were thought of 

 as fair boys or girls beloved by deities. So, when a Greek 

 felt their charm, his mind instinctively reverted to the human 

 tales of passion and of fate, whereof they were for him the 

 living emblems. He did not moralise the pathos of their 



