NATURAL DESCRIPTIONS IN THE HEBREW WRITERS. 411 



lands of Europe, Elias Lonnrot has collected from the lips of 

 the Karelians and the country people of Olonetz, a large 

 number of Finnish songs, in which " there breathes." accord- 

 ing to the expression of Jacob Grimm, "an animated love of 

 nature rarely to be met with in any poetiy but that of India."* 

 An ancient epos containing nearly three thousand verses treats 

 of a fight between the Fins and Laps, and the fate of a demi- 

 god named Vaino. It gives an interesting account of Fin- 

 nish country life, especially in that portion of the work where 

 Ilmarine, the wife of the smith, sends her flocks into the 

 woods, and offers up prayers for their safety. Few races 

 exhibit greater or more remarkable differences in mental cul- 

 tivation, and in the direction of their feelings, according as they 

 have been determined by the degeneration of servitude, war- 

 like ferocity, or a continual striving for political freedom, than 

 the Fins, who have been so variously subdivided, although 

 retaining kindred languages. In evidence of this, w r e need 

 only refer to the now peaceful population amongst whom the 

 epos above referred to was found, to the Huns, once cele- 

 brated for conquests that disturbed the then existing order of 

 things, and who have long been confounded with the Monguls, 

 and lastly, to a great and noble people the Magyars. 



After having considered the extent to which intensity in 

 the love of nature, and animation in the mode of its expres- 

 sion may be ascribed to differences of race, to the peculiar in- 

 fluence of the configuration of the soil, the form of govern- 

 ment, and the character of religious belief, it now remains for 

 us to throw a glance over those nations of Asia who offer 

 the strongest contrast to the Arian or Indo- Germanic races, 

 or in other words, to the Indians and Persians. 



The Semitic or Aramaeic nations afford evidence of a pro- 

 found sentiment of love for nature, in the most ancient and 

 venerable monuments of their poetic feeling and creative fancy. 

 This sentiment is nobly and vividly manifested in their pastoral 

 effusions, in their hymns and choral songs, in all the splendour 

 of lyric poetry in the Psalms of David, and in the schools of 

 the seers and prophets, whose exalted inspiration almost 

 wholly removed from the past, turns its prophetic aspirations 

 to the future. 



The Hebraic poetry, besides all its innate exalted sublimity, 

 * Ueoer ein finnisclics Epos, Jacob Grimm, 1845, s. o. 



