sions of intimate sympathy with plants and
animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background;
metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only
by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses
and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to
greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or
hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle
Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy,
educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation,
frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there
was no question.

Over this mediaeval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it.
He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human
action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the
interpretation of Nature.[1]

In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider
and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he
was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama,
and from the mere passion for describing, which so often carried
Calderon away.

In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into
modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and
comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with
which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only
form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but
exert a distinct influence upon human fate.

As Carriere points out:

At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was
turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced
effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger.

Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere
where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's
outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual
beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy
with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in
_Hamlet_, breathe the bracing Highland air in _Macbeth_, the air of
the woods in _As You Like It_; the storm on the heath roars through
Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside
Julia's window.

'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all