or calculated to bring the
landscape before the mind's eye. No doubt, the Greek was led to this
course by an instinct. For, first, his interest in inanimate nature was
nothing as compared to his strong sympathies with man. He had not
discovered that "God made the country, and man made the town." The gods,
according to his notion, ruled the destinies of man, and every thought
and device of man were inspirations from above. He saw infinitely more
of deity in his fellow-men--in his and their pleasures, pursuits, and
hopes--than in all the insentient things on the face of the earth; and
consequently he clung to men. He delighted in representations of them;
and in embodying his conceptions of the gods, he gave them the human
form as the noblest and most beautiful of all forms. Nature was merely a
background exquisitely beautiful, but not to be enjoyed without the
presence of man. And, secondly, though the Greeks may not have
enunciated the principle, that poetry is not the art suited for
picturing nature, still they probably had an instinctive feeling of its
truth. Poetry, as Lessing pointed out in his Laocoon, has the element of
time in it, and is therefore inapplicable in the description of those
things which, while composed of various parts, must be comprehended at
one glance before the right impression is produced. Look how our modern
poet goes to work! He has a fair scene before his fancy. He paints every
part of it, with no reason why one part should be placed before
another,--and as you read it, you have to piece each part together, as
in a child's dissected map; and after you have constructed the whole out
of the fragments, you have to imagine the effect. The Greek told you the
effect at once,--he gave up the attempt to picture the scene in words.
But when he had to deal with any part of nature that had life or motion
in it--in fact, any element of time--then he was as minute as the most
thorough Wordsworthian could wish. How admirably, for instance, does
Homer describe the advance of a foam-crested wave, or the rush of a
lion, the swoop of an eagle, or the trail of a serpent!

The Greeks were as much gladdened by the sight of flowers as moderns.
Did they not use them continually on all festive occasions, public and
private? But minuteness of detail was out of the question in poetry. The
poet was not to play the painter or the naturalist. And it had not yet
become the fashion to profess a mysterious inexpressible joy