in the
observation of natural scenery. Nor had men as yet retired from human
society in disgust, or in search of freedom from sin, and betaken
themselves to the love of pure inanimate objects instead of the love of
sin-stained man. It had not yet become unlawful, as it did with the
Arabs afterwards, to represent the human form in sculpture. Human nature
was not looked on as so contemptible, that it would be appropriate to
represent human bodies writhing under gargoyles, as in Gothic churches,
or beneath pillars, as in Stirling Palace. The human form was then
considered diviner than the forms of lions or flowers.

In bold personification of natural objects, the Greeks could not be
easily surpassed. In reality, it was not personification with them,--it
was simply the result of the ideas they had formed regarding causation.
If a river flowed down, fringed with flowery banks, they imagined there
must be some cause for this, and so they summoned up before their fancy
a beautiful river-god crowned with a garland. Even in the more common
process of making nature pour back on us the sentiments we unconsciously
lend her, the Greeks were very far from deficient. The passage in which
Alcman describes the hills, and all the tribes of living things as
asleep,[5] and the celebrated fragment of Simonides on Danae, where she
says, "Let the deep sleep, let immeasurable evil sleep," are only two
out of very many instances that might be quoted.

Perhaps the most marked instance of the poetic instinct of the Greeks,
is their avoiding descriptions of personal beauty. Though they were
permeated by the idea, and thrillingly sensitive to it, it is easier to
tell what a Scotch poet regards as elements of beauty than what a Greek
did. A beautiful person with the Greek is a beautiful person; and that
is all he says about the matter. This is not true of the Anacreontics,
or of the Latin poets. Now, in Scotland, again, there is little feeling
of beauty of any kind. A Scottish boy wantonly mars a beautiful object
for mere fun. There is not a monument set up, not a fine building or
ornament, but will soon have a chip struck off it, if a Scotch boy can
get near it. And the Scotsman, as a general matter, sees beauty nowhere
except in a "bonnie lassie." Even then, when he comes to define what he
thinks beautiful features, he is at fault, and there are songs in praise
of the narrow waist, and other enormities--

"She 's backet like a peacock;