our own time. It seems a
strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took
landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its
subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of
the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often
significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and
in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and
especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet
in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and
Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime
subject which engages their attention.

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the
background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the
foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry
and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether
the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and
shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the
gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry
on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in
the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject
contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure
lost.

In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great
artist of human life and fate; even if _Paradise Lost_ were to leave us
in some uncertainty, the _Samson_ would convince us all. But, while I
think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his
earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the _Lycidas_ and
even in the _Paradise_, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature
and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet,
lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had
unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly
enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who,
when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of
nature.

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets
in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work
we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling