SO DESCRIPTIONS OP NATURAL SCENERY 



intellectual cultivation, Christianity spread among the Ger- 

 manic and Celtic races, who had previously been devoted to 

 the worship of nature, and who honoured under rude symbols 

 its preserving and destroying powers, the close and affec- 

 tionate intercourse with the external world of phsenomena 

 which we have remarked among the early Christians of 

 Greece and Italy, as well as all endeavours to trace the 

 action of natural forces, fell gradually under suspicion, as 

 tending towards sorcery. They were therefore regarded as 

 not less dangerous than the art of the sculptor had appeared 

 to Tcrtullian, Clemens of Alexandria, and almost all the 

 most ancient fathers of the church. In the twelfth and 

 thirteenth centuries, the Councils of Tours (1163) and of 

 Paris (1209) forbade to monks the sinful reading of writings 

 on physical science ( 51 ). These intellectual fetters were 

 first broken by the courage of Albertus Magnus and Roger 

 Bacon ; when nature was pronounced pure, and reinstated in 

 her ancient rights. 



Hitherto we have sought to depict differences which have 

 ahewn themselves in different periods of time ; and in two 

 literatures so nearly allied as were those of the Greeks and 

 the Romans. But not only are great differences in modes 

 of feeling produced by time, by the changes which it 

 brings with it, in forms of government, in manners, and 

 in religious views, but diversities still more striking are 

 produced by differences of race and of mental disposition. 

 How different in animation and in poetic colouring are the 

 manifestations of the love of nature and the descriptions of 

 natural scenery among the Greeks, the Germans of the 

 north, the Semitic races, the Persians, and the Indians! 



