where the feeling for Nature cannot be called moral, and yet stirs us
like the deepest moral criticism upon life, rising as far beyond the
mere idealism of sentiment as it does beyond the utmost refinement of
realistic art.

In all these different forms the feeling for Nature may be illustrated
from Greek poetry; but the broad fact remains that Nature on the whole
has a smaller part than it has with modern poets. Descriptive pieces
are executed in a slighter manner, and on the whole with a more
conventional treatment. Landscapes, for example, are always a
background, never (or hardly ever) the picture itself. The influence
of mythology on art was so overwhelming that, down to the last, it
determined the treatment of many subjects where we should now go
directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has
been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the
unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep
effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of
a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so
accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free
from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the
appeal to Nature as knowing more about man's destiny than he knows
himself, was unknown to the Greek poets. But this feeling is
sentimental, not moral; and with them too "something far more deeply
interfused" stirred the deepest sources of emotion. The music of Pan,
at which the rustle of the oakwood ceases and the waterfall from the
cliff is silent and the faint bleating of the sheep dies away,[1] is
the expression in an ancient language of the spirit of Nature, fixed
and embodied by the enchanting touch of art.

Of the epigrams which deal primarily with the sensuous feeling for