hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms, saw the god
hiding in the thicket, and the naiad drifting with the stream. The
modern Wordsworthian, desiring to make man one with Nature, finds in
external things 'the symbols of our inner life, the workings of a spirit
akin to our own.' There is much that is suggestive in these early
chapters of Professor Veitch's book, but we cannot agree with him in the
view he takes of the primitive attitude towards Nature. The 'open-air
feeling,' of which he talks, seems to us comparatively modern. The
earliest Nature-myths tell us, not of man's 'sensuous enjoyment' of
Nature, but of the terror that Nature inspires. Nor are darkness and
storm regarded by the primitive man as 'simply repulsive'; they are to
him divine and supernatural things, full of wonder and full of awe. Some
reference, also, should have been made to the influence of towns on the
development of the nature-feeling, for, paradox though it may seem, it is
none the less true that it is largely to the creation of cities that we
owe the love of the country.

Professor Veitch is on a safer ground when he comes to deal with the
growth and manifestations of this feeling as displayed in Scotch poetry.
The early singers, as he points out, had all the mediaeval love of
gardens, all the artistic delight in the bright colours of flowers and
the pleasant song of birds, but they felt no sympathy for the wild
solitary moorland, with its purple heather, its grey rocks and its waving
bracken. Montgomerie was the first to wander out on the banks and braes
and to listen to the music of the burns, and it was reserved for Drummond
of Hawthornden to sing of flood and forest and to notice the beauty of
the mists on the hillside and the snow on the mountain tops. Then came
Allan Ramsay with his honest homely pastorals; Thomson, who writes about
Nature like an eloquent auctioneer, and yet was a keen observer, with a
fresh eye and an open heart; Beattie, who approached the problems that
Wordsworth afterwards solved; the great Celtic epic of Ossian, such an
important factor in the romantic movement of Germany and France;
Fergusson, to whom Burns is so much indebted; Burns himself, Leyden, Sir
Walter Scott, James Hogg and (longo intervallo) Christopher North and the
late Professor Shairp. On nearly all these poets Professor Veitch writes
with fine judgment and delicate feeling, and even his admiration for
Burns has nothing absolutely aggr