12 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



fountains, under an ever mild sky, and through which the 

 beautiful Pamisus rolls his stream/' 



Bucolic poetry, born in the Sicilian fields, and popularly 

 inclined to the dramatic, has been called, with reason, a 

 transitional form. These pastoral epics on a small scale 

 depict human beings rather than scenery : they do so in 

 Theocritus, in whose hands tin's form of poetry reached its 

 greatest perfection. A soft elegiac element is indeed every 

 where proper to the idyll, as if it had arisen from " the 

 longing for a lost ideal;" or as if in the human breast a 

 degree of melancholy were ever blended with the deeper 

 feelings which the view of nature inspires. 



When the true poetry of Greece expired with Grecian 

 liberty, that which remained became descriptive, didactic, 

 instructive; astronomy, geography, and the arts of the 

 hunter and the fisherman, appeared in the age of Alexander 

 and his successors as objects of poetry, and were indeed 

 1 often adorned with much metrical skill. The forms and 

 Ihabits of animals are described with grace, and often with 

 jsuch exactness that our modern classifying natural histo- 

 rians can recognise genera and even species. But in none 

 of these writings can we discover the presence of that inner 

 life that inspired contemplation whereby to the poet, 

 almost unconsciously to himself, the external world becomes 

 a subject of the imagination. The undue preponderance of 

 the descriptive element shews itself in the forty-eight cantos 

 of the Dionysiaca of the Egyptian Nonnus, which are dis- 

 tinguished by a very artfully constructed verse. This poet 

 takes pleasure in describing great revolutions of nature ; he 

 makes a fire kindled by lightning on the wooded banks of 



