e any beauty in the Alps. Livy's 'Foeditas
Alpinum' and the dreadful descriptions of Ammian, with others, are
the much-quoted vouchers for this. Nor is it surprising; for modern
appreciation, still in its youth, is really due to increased
knowledge about Nature, to a change of feeling, and to the
conveniences of modern travelling, unknown 2000 years ago.

The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment out
of the question; and only served to heighten the unfavourable
contrast between the wildness of the mountain regions and the
cultivation of Italy.

Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it became
a favourite subject for description; and Seneca notes, as shewing a
morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, that
travelling not only attracts men to delightful places, but that some
even exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate soil
delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the
forest of Calabria, and let us seek some pleasure amidst the deserts,
in such sort as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in
beholding, at our pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage
places.'

We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the
conditions under which a conscious feeling for Nature develops, and
the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course
this feeling has followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews,
Greeks, and Romans. The movement toward the modern, toward the
subjective and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its
gradual development along lines which are always strictly analogous
to those of culture in general, through the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER I

CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM

When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative
power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with
her riddle guessed,--and mediaeval civilization arose, founded upon
Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history
when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all
things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the
old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever
failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into
the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was
so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly,
like a phoenix,