COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE GREEKS. 375
Neptune concealed under the significant names of mythical
characters. The Boeotian, and, indeed, all the ancient schools
of poetry,
treat only of the phenomena of the external world,
under the personification
of human forms.
But if, as we have already remarked, natural descriptions,
whether they delineate the richness and luxuriance of tropical
vegetation, or pourtray the habits of animals, have only
become a distinct branch of literature in the most recent
times, this circumstance must not be regarded as a proof of
the absence of susceptibility for the beauties of nature, where
the perception of beauty was so intense,* nor must we suppose
that the animated expression of a spirit of poetic contemplation
was wanting to the Greeks, who have transmitted
to us such inimitable proofs of their creative
faculty, alike in
poetry and in sculpture. All that we are led by the tendency
of our modern ideas to discover as deficient in this department
of ancient literature, is rather of a negative than of a
positive kind, being evinced less in the absence of suscepti-
bility than in that of the urgent impulse to give expression,
in words, to the sentiment awakened by the charms of nature.
Directed less to the inanimate world of phenomena than to
the realities of active life, and to the inner and spontaneous
emotions of the mind, the earliest, and, at the same time, the
noblest directions of the poetic spirit were epic and lyric. In
these artificial forms, descriptions of nature can only occur as
incidental accessories, and not as special creations of fancy.
As the influence of antiquity gradually disappeared, and as the
bright beauty of its blossoms faded, rhetorical figures became
more and more diffused through descriptive and didactic
poetry. This form of poetry, which in its earliest philosophical,
half-sacerdotal
type, was solemn, grand, and devoid of ornament
as we see exemplified in the poem of Empedocles On
Nature by degrees lost its simplicity and earlier dignity, as
it became more strongly marked by a rhetorical character.
I may be permitted here to mention a few particular
instances in illustration of these general observations. In
conformity with the character of the Epos, we find the most
attractive scenes of nature introduced in the Homeric songs
merely as "
secondary adjuncts. The shepherd rejoices in
* Compare Jacobs, Leben und Kunst der Alien, bd. i., abth. i.
i.vii.