BY THE GREEKS. 9 



sion of a contemplative poetic spirit wanting, where the 

 creative power of the Hellenic mind produced inimitable 

 master works in poetry and in the plastic arts. The defi- 

 ciency which appears to our modern ideas in this department 

 of antiquity, betokens not so much a want of sensibility, as 

 the absence of a prevailing impulse to disclose in words the 

 feeling of natural beauty. Directed less to the inanimate 

 world of phsenomena than to that of human action, and of 

 the internal spontaneous emotions, the earliest and the 

 noblest developments of the poetic spirit were epical and 

 lyrical. These were forms in which natural descriptions 

 could only hold a subordinate, and, as it were, an accidental 

 place, and could not appear as distinct productions of the 

 imagination. As the influence of antiquity gradually de- 

 clined, and as its blossoms faded, the rhetorical spirit shewed 

 itself in descriptive as well as in didactic poetry ; and the 

 latter, which, in its earlier philosophical and semi-priestly 

 character, had been severe, grand, and unadorned, as in 

 Empedocles' "Poem of Nature/' gradually lost its early 

 simple dignity. 



I may be permitted to illustrate these general observations 

 by a few particular instances. Conformably to the character 

 of the Epos, natural scenes and images, however charming, 

 appear in the Homeric songs always as mere incidental 

 adjuncts. " The shepherd rejoices in the calm of night, 

 when the winds are still ; in the pure ether, and in the 

 bright stars shining in the vault of heaven ; he hears from 

 afar the rushing of the suddenly-swollen forest torrent, 

 bearing down earth and trunks of uprooted oaks" ( 10 ). The 

 fine description of the sylvan loneliness of Parnassus, and 

 of its dark, thickly-wooded rocky valleys, contrasts with the 



