8 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



either of external form or of inward spirit. It was almost 

 exclusively by such applications that the consideration of 

 nature was thought worthy of a place in poetry in the form 

 of comparisons or similitudes, which often present small 

 detached pictures, full of objective vividness and truth. 



At Delphi, paeans to spring ( 6 ) were sung probably to 

 express men's joy that the privations and discomforts of 

 winter were past. A natural description of winter has been 

 interwoven (may it not be by a later Ionian rhapsodist ?) 

 with the Works and Days" of Hesiod (7). This poem, 

 full of a noble simplicity, but purely didactic in its form, 

 gives advice respecting agriculture, and directions for 

 different kinds of work and profitable employment, together 

 with ethical exhortations to a blameless life. Its tone rises 

 to a more lyrical character when the poet clothes the miseries 

 of mankind, or the fine allegorical mythus of Epimetheus 

 and Pandora, with an anthropomorphic garb. In Hesiod's 

 Theogony, which is composed of various ancient and dissi- 

 milar elements, we find repeatedly (as, for example, in the 

 enumeration of the Nereides ( 8 ) ), natural descriptions veiled 

 under the significant names of mythic personages. In the 

 Boeotian bardic school, and generally in all ancient Greek 

 poetry, the phsenomena of the external world are introduced 

 only by personification under human forms. 



But if it be true, as we have remarked, that natural 

 descriptions, whether of the richness and luxuriance of 

 southern vegetation, or the portraiture in fresh and vivid 

 colours of the habits of animals, have only become a distinct 

 branch of literature in very modern times, it was not that 

 sensibility to the beauty of nature was absent ( 9 ), where the 

 perception of beauty was so intense, or the animated expres- 



