XIV 



NATURE IN LITERATURE 



O EVEEAL different kinds or phases of this thing 

 ^^ we call Nature have at different times appeared 

 in literature. For instance, there is the personified 

 or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an 

 expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish 

 ignorance, and the tyranny of personality ; the 

 Greek was so alive himself that he made everything 

 else alive, and so manly and human that he could 

 see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek 

 idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like 

 spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or 

 fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in 

 a measure of Virgil's Nature. In a later class of 

 writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is 

 steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian 

 Church ; it is a kind of theological Nature. 



In English literature there is the artificial Nature 

 of Pope and his class, — a kind of classic liturgy 

 repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as 

 fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and af- 

 fected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the 

 melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic 

 muse ; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualized 



