from one end to the other
of mediaeval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle
Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy; and has a terrible eeriness in
its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where
the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the
reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like
those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the
goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a
little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to
look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine
wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of
those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the
white bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy Clitumnus; still
less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would
stroll, following the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with
garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden god. Nothing
of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediaeval poetry; the city
only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest.

And to this narrowness of mediaeval notions of outdoor life, inherited
together with mediaeval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth
century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the
romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance
poets--Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens--of modern times, in
the matter of--how shall I express it?--the ideal life, the fortunate
realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal
country is merely a more delightful reality; and its inhabitants happier
everyday men and women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it is
always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and architects. For, as
we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no
ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the
sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling
artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all
imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid
god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies
hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable
architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with unco