BY THE GERMANS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 31 



An opinion has been repeatedly expressed, that the delight 

 in nature felt by northern nations, and the longing desire 

 for the pleasant fields of Italy and Greece, and for the won- 

 derful luxuriance of tropical vegetation, are principally to be 

 ascribed to the long winter's privation of all such enjoy- 

 ments. We do not mean to deny that the longing for the 

 climate of palms seems to diminish as we approach the 

 South of France and the Iberian Peninsula ; but the now 

 generally employed, and ethnologically correct name of Indo- 

 Germanic races, might alone be sufficient to remind us that 

 we must be cautious lest we generalise too much respecting 

 the influence thus ascribed to northern winters. The rich- 

 ness of the poetic literature of the Indians teaches us, that 

 within and near the tropics south of the great chain of the 

 Himalaya, the sight of ever verdant and ever flowering 

 forests has at all times acted as a powerful stimulus to the 

 poetic and imaginative faculties of the East-Arianic nations, 

 and that these nations have been more strongly inclined to 

 picturesque descriptions of nature than the true Germanic 

 races, who, in the far inhospitable north, had extended even 

 into Iceland. A deprivation, or, at least, a certain inter- 

 ruption of the enjoyment of nature, is not, however, un- 

 known even to the happier climates of Southern Asia . the 

 seasons are there abruptly divided from each other by alter- 

 nate periods of fertilising rain and of dusty desolating 

 aridity. In the Persian plateau of West Aria, the desert 

 often extends in deep bays far into the interior of the most 

 smiling and fruitful lands. In Middle and in Western 

 Asia, a margin of forest often forms as it were the shore of 

 a widely extended inland sea of steppe ; and thus the inhabi- 

 . tants of these hot countries have presented to them the 



