SUMMARY. X iii 



p. 411. Aramaeic nations : natural poetry of the Hebrews in which 

 we trace the reflection of Monotheism pp. 411-415. Ancient Arabic 

 poetry. Descriptions in Antar of the Bedouin life in the desert. De- 

 scriptions of nature in Amrul Kais p. 416. After the downfall of the 

 Aramseic, Greek, and Koman power, there appears Dante Alighieri, 

 whose poetic creations breathe from time to time the deepest sentiment 

 of admiration for the terrestrial life of nature. Petrarch, Bojardo and 

 Vittoria Colonna. The JStna dialogus and the picturesque delinea- 

 tion of the luxuriant vegetation of the new world in the Historic^ 

 Venetce of Bembo. Christopher Columbus p. 421. Camoens' Lusiad 

 p. 424. Spanish poetry: the Araucana of Don Alonso de Ercilla. 

 Fray Luis de Leon and Calderon, with the remarks on the same of 

 Ludwig Tieck. Shakspeare, Milton, Thomson p. 430. French prose 

 writers : Rousseau, Buflfon, Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand 

 pp. 431-434. Review of the narratives of the older travellers of 

 the Middle Ages, John Mandeville, Hans Schiltberger, and Bernhard 

 von Breitenbach; contrast with modern travellers. Cook's compa- 

 nion George Foster p. 437. The blame sometimes justly applied to 

 descriptive poetry as an independent form does not refer to the attempt 

 either to give a picture of distant zones visited by the writer, or 

 to convey to others by the force of applicable words an image of the 

 results yielded by a direct contemplation of nature. All parts of the 

 vast sphere of creation, from the equator to the frigid zones, are endowed 

 with the happy power of exercising a vivid impression on the human 

 mind, 439. 



II. Landscape painting in its animating influence on the study of 

 nature. In classical antiquity, in accordance with the respective mental 

 direction of different nations, landscape painting and the poetic delinea- 

 tion of a particular region, were neither of them independent objects of 

 art. The elder Philostratus. Scenography. Ludius. Evidences of 

 landscape painting amongst the Indians in the brilliant period of Vi- 

 kramaditya. Herculaneum and Pompeii. Painting amongst Christians, 

 from Constantine the Great to the beginning of the Middle Ages ; of 

 landscape painting in the historical pictures of the brothers Van Eyck. 

 The seventeenth century the most brilliant epoch of landscape painting. 

 Miniatures on manuscripts p. 444. Development of the elements 

 of painting. (Claude Lorraine, Ruysdael, Gaspard and Nicholas Poussin, 

 Everdingen, Hobbima, and Cuyp.) Subsequent striving to give natural 

 truthfulness to the representation of vegetable forms. Representation 

 of tropical vegetation. Franz Post, tlae companion of Prince Maurice 

 of Nassau. Eckhout. Requirement for a representation of the phy- 

 siognomy of nature. The great and still imperfectly completed cos- 

 mical event of the independence of Spanish and Portuguese America, 

 and the foundation of constitutional freedom in regions of the chain of 

 Cordilleras between the tropics, where there are populous cities situated 

 at an elevation of 14,000 feet above the level of the sea, together with 

 the increasing civilisation of India, New Holland, the Sandwich Islands, 

 and Southern Africa, will undoubtedly impart a new impulse and a 

 more exalted character to landscape painting, no less than to meteoro- 



