THIS is a remarkable book, whether for the lover of landscape or the lover of poetry. The author has both keen critical judgment and exquisite poetic sensibility; he is, indeed, equally well known as poet and as critic. The present work is enlarged from lectures delivered at Oxford in 1895, and partly with an eye to the university extension system by which the sphere of the institution has been so happily widened in recent years. It is mainly with reference to this latter class of students and readers that the many illustrations from ancient or foreign literatures have been translated. These translations are generally in prose and as literal as possible; but verse renderings have occasionally been included when they were sufficiently close to the original.
After a prefatory chapter in which the " main aspects of Nature taken by man's mind in poetry " and their chronological development are discussed, landscape in the Greek epic is considered. In the " Iliad" and " Odyssey," " natural description as such is always purely incidental to the narrative, introduced most often in the form of comparison." After the lapse of 3000 years, Homer's small landscapes seem as if they might have been written to-day. He is " the most unaffected of all poets"; hence, as Wordsworth puts it, " his eye is on his object," and hence also "this modernness, this truth for all time." He was, moreover, "equal to anything," to the landscape of the camp or the garden, to calm domestic scenes or "the magnificent boar-hunt of the youthful Odysseus, which in vigor and movement of life and clear definition anticipates Scott's similar scene in 'The Bride.'" Illustrations of landscape in Greek lyrical, idyllic, and epigrammatic poetry are drawn from Sappho, Ibykus (who on the same page appears in the old familiar form of "Ibycus"), Pindar, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Menander, and others. "Conscious sensibility to Nature," the delight in landscape for its own sake, appears "first and perhaps most exquisitely in the bucolic Idylls of Theocritus," who was "so loved of Virgil and of Tennyson." The reader will recall Mr. E. C. Stedman's abundant illustrations of Tennyson's indebtedness to the Sicilian singer in his "Victorian Poets."
Landscape in Lucretius, Virgil, and other Augustan poets is then taken up. The contrast between Lucretius and Virgil is vast, "hardly less than the transit in imagination from Siberia to Italy." "To Lucretius impassive, feelingless law sways the world, dead to mankind, who can only accept their fate. Virgil for this substitutes a vision of Providential rule, which teaches man by its constant order. Unlike Lucretius, he lived when the world was at length 'lapt in universal law. Yet a 'pathetic undertone, a "sad earnestness, as Cardinal Newman has beautifully remarked, almost everywhere underlies his verse. He has the note of yearning." He delights in "the soft sweet freshness of Italy," and describes it with a melody whose cadences, as Hamerton says of the line "Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae," in the first Eclogue, are "soft almost as the falling of the shadows themselves." (By the way, why does Mr. Palgrave translate this line, "And larger shadows fall on the lofty mountains"?). To sum up the matter, "whilst Lucretius scientifically interrogates Nature, Virgil, though longing to investigate, embraces her." The illustrations from Virgil are exclusively from the "Eclogues" and the "Georgics." The "AEneid" is dismissed with a brief mention of "two bright pictures from insect life; the bees whose toil is compared with that of the builders from [at] Carthage, and the ants as they store grain for winter." Yet there are lovely little landscape sketches in the "AEneid," like that of the landing place of the Trojans in book i., lines 159–169 ("Est in secessu longo locus," etc.), to refer to a single instance which we have always admired.
–The Critic, Vol. 30