LANDSCAPE 271 



ephemeral bloom like Herrick, or apply them to his own 

 emotions in didactic mood like Wordsworth. He told their 

 stories again, and spoke of them as Adonis, Clytia, Phyllis, 

 Hyacinthus, Myrrha. 



This, then, was the Greek way of regarding nature ; and it 

 persisted in their poetry and art long after the faculty of 

 making myths had been exhausted. Another kind of senti- 

 ment for landscape, as we shall presently see, grew up in the 

 course of centuries. But so tenacious and conservative are 

 the forms of art when they have once been stereotyped in 

 verse and plastic shape, that the old legends, hallowed by 

 association, kept their grasp upon the people's mind. 



Turning from Greece to Rome, we find ourselves upon an 

 alien soil. The Latin religion, though it had racial affinities 

 with the Hellenic, and though these were emphasised by the 

 early adoption of Greek literature as a standard, remained 

 more abstract in its character, more rigid and utilitarian, less 

 poetical and picturesque. Owing to the barrenness of their 

 mythology, Romans were able to view nature with eyes 

 undazzled by the mirage of the mythopoeic fancy. The stiff 

 gods and goddesses of Ovid's ' Fasti ' Robigo, Terminus, 

 and the rest of them intervened with no legendary charm of 

 human fate and passion and of human adolescence between 

 the Latin mind and landscape. Accordingly we find in the 

 earliest and the latest of the Latin poets a feeling akin to our 

 own the feeling of the natural man returning to the womb 

 which bore him and the breasts which gave him suck when 

 these came close to Nature in her solitudes. The deep and 

 solemn passion of Lucretius, the pathos of Virgil, their common 

 love for the Saturnian earth, their sense of things and thoughts 

 too deep for tears, sounded in Latin poetry a note we do not 

 hear among the Hellenes. There is in their verse the 

 mystery, the awe, the feeling after an indwelling deity, the 

 communion with nature as nature, which we are accustomed 

 to call modern. 



I have elsewhere pointed out that we must look for hybrids 

 in all creations of the Roman genius. By modelling their art 

 upon the Greek type, the Romans precluded themselves from 



