has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master.
Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a
nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English
flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England,
before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods?
How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature
of his native landscape, till

---- 'Auld Coila's plains and fells,
Her muirs, red-brown wi' heather-bells,
Her banks and braes, her dens and dells,'

live again in the magic of his song. And Horace--with what charming
playfulness, with what exquisite grace, has he not figured the
olive-groves of Tibur, the pendent vines ruddy with the luscious
grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of
fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these
poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that
none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty of a
sea-prospect?

First, as to Horace. When climbing the heights of Mount Vultur, that
Lucanian hill where once, when overcome by fatigue, the youthful poet
lay sleeping, and doves covered his childish and wearied limbs with
leaves--Horace must have often viewed, with their wide expanse
glittering in the sun, the waters of the Adriatic--often must he have
hailed the grateful freshness of the sea-breeze and the invigorating
perfumes of

---- 'the early sea-smell blown