36 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



remarks that grass now grows in the palaces of those who 

 once ruled there/ " 



The German Thier-epos, which must not be confounded 

 with the oriental " fable/' originated in habitual association 

 and familiarity with the animal world ; to paint which was 

 not, however, its purpose. This peculiar class of poem, 

 which Jacob Grimm has treated in so masterly a manner, in 

 the introduction to his edition of Eeinhart Fuchs, shews a 

 cordial delight in nature. The animals, not attached to the 

 ground., excited by passion, and gifted by the poet with 

 speech, contrast with the still life of the silent plants, and 

 form a constantly active element enlivening the landscape. 

 *' The early poetry loves to look on the life of nature with hu- 

 man eyes, and lends to animals, and even to plants, human 

 thoughts and feelings; giving a- fanciful and childlike 

 interpretation to all that has been observed of their forms 

 and habits. Plants and flowers, gathered and used by gods 

 and heroes, are afterwards named from them. In reading 

 the old German epic, in which brutes are the actors, we 

 breathe an air redolent as it were with the sylvan odours of 

 some ancient forest" ( 56 ). 



Formerly we might have been tempted to number among 

 the memorials of Germanic poetry having reference to 

 external nature, the supposed remains of the Celto-Irish 

 poems, which, for half a century, passed as shapes of mist 

 from nation to nation, under the name of Ossian ; but the 

 spell has been broken since the complete discovery of the 

 literary fraud of the talented Macplierson, by his publication 

 of the supposed Gaelic original text, now known to have 

 been a retranslation from the English work. There are, 



