f this notorious ravine, between sky-high
Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow
that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal
experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a
belated echo of Fortunatus.

We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German
literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature,
whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far
scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have
so often stated, mediaeval Germany stood high above antiquity in this
respect. Gervinus, a classic example on the last point, in the
section of his history of German poetry which treats of the
difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand,
and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said:

The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far
slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge
as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of
their natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the
animal world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity
did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very
foundation of these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor
sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature.
The art of hunting and the passion for it, often carried to
excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it. It is a bold remark
of Grimm's that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the
German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will
feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who
cares for Nature and life in the open.

This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people
stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to
the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier
enquiries[6] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer
and the sentimental in Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for
hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days
far more than in the Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of
feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in
European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and
that it was the fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and
that alone, which enabled t