e trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears
... more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful
landscape cured him. (BURCKHARDT.)

He defined a beautiful landscape as one in which one could see in its
different parts, sea, mountain, lake or spring, dry rocks or plains,
wood and valley. Therefore he cared for variety; and, what is more
striking, in contrast to level country, he admired mountains and
rocks!

In Hellenism, hunting, to which only the Macedonians had been
addicted before, became a fashion, and was enjoyed with Oriental pomp
in the _paradeisoi_. Writers drew most of their comparisons from it.
In the Renaissance, Petrarch did the same, and animals often served
as emblems of state--their condition ominous of good or evil--and
were fostered with superstitious veneration, as, for example, the
lions at Florence.

Thus the growth of the natural sciences increased interest in the
external world, and sensitiveness brought about a sentimental
attitude towards Nature in Hellenism and in the Renaissance.

Both discovered in Nature a source of purest pleasure; the
Renaissance feeling was, in fact, the extension and enhancement of
the Hellenic. Burckhardt overlooked the fact that beautiful scenery
was appreciated and described for its own sake in Hellenism, but he
says very justly;

The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the
outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.... By the
year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty
enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found
lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which
gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena
of Nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields and the
woods. But these pictures are all foreground without perspective.

Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; but
only for certain stereotyped phases. Of the individuality of a
landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was
said.

Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in
this respect, although they deserve a closer examination.

These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the twelfth
century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of Europe
had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French hand.
Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshnes