30 
NATURE NOTES. 
The imagination of the older poets is chiefly occupied with the 
riches and wonderfulness of man’s life ; to that they give the first 
place, the riches and wonders of nature are quite secondary : 
seeming always to bear in mind that “ the proper study of man- 
kind is man,” they paint nature merely as a background to their 
main subject of human nature. To this class belong the Greek 
poets, and their imitators the Latins. Even Theocritus and his 
followers, in some ways most like the moderns, never arrest the 
dramatic action of the story, but only make it move more slowly. 
Dante and the Italian poets proceed in the same style. And 
even Chaucer and the English school was much the same. Had 
the trees and rivers Chaucer loved, the daisies that made his 
heart leap as a child, or the birds whose carols were so dear to 
him, lost their association with human story, they would by him 
have been considered to have lost much of their charm. It was 
the type of a school. These poets did, it is true, personify 
nature, treated her as a handmaiden, and sometimes designated 
her as a goddess ; and they invented or codified all sorts of rapt 
myths whereby to display, in their style, her many beauties to 
popular fancy. Streams became peopled with nymphs ; groves 
had Pan and his goat-footed satyrs ; a flying maiden was trans- 
formed into a laurel to escape the embraces of too ardent a 
pursuing lover; and the Darby and Joan of old, happy beings! 
passed together as a pair of united yew-trees, into an old age of 
mutual felicity. These were classic times, the golden age, and 
poets recorded for us its scenes in that famous classic phrase 
which has passed into or forms part of our modern poetry. 
Authors who had been familiar with country-scenes often made 
these reappear, in like fashion, in their poetry. Sophocles sang 
the praises of his native Colonos, and is even said by Plutarch 
to have been at once triumphantly acquitted of a charge of 
imbecility in his old age by reciting to his judges a famous chorus 
from his (Edipus. Theocritus and the Sicilian poets wrote 
beautiful idyllic poetry, and passed it over to their imitator Virgil, 
who was the son of a farmer, and who, along with the reproduced 
Sicilian landscapes, added much that he had observed about his 
native Mantua. So it passed on through the middle ages, with 
many additions from the poets of Italy, Spain, and France. 
In our own time this kind of poetry has been, very properly, 
continued and developed. One of the very healthiest poets that 
the English race has produced in modern times was Sir Walter 
Scott ; yet both he and his great predecessor Chaucer, show in 
their poetry the spirit that is content to enjoy the beauty of the 
world as it is, of which beauty they indicate that the part played 
by Nature’s own loveliness is, in their view, by no means the 
first ; hence they do not linger so long over them as to lead to 
the impression that they write for this alone. And many of our 
modern poets, when they treat of Nature, seem to be, at times, 
as careful as Homer never to let slip the fact that the obtrusion 
of landscape, however beautiful, can be entirely dispensed with. 
