to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of
instances too; if we put this from Propertius’s _Hylas_:—
. . . manus heroum . . .
Mollia composita litora fronde togit—
side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:—
_λειμὼν yάρ σφιν ἔκειτο μέyας_, _στιβάδεσσιν ὄνειαρ_—
we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and of
the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get
specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the
conventional: for instance, Keats’s:—
What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed
with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.
German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling
nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called
_Zueignung_, prefixed to Goethe’s poems; the morning walk, the mist, the
dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given with the eye
on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a handling of nature,
stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added; the power of
these is not what gives the poem in question its merit, but a power of
quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the
power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and
nobly too, as any one who will read his _Wanderer_,—the poem in which a
wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built
out of the ruins of a temple near Cuma,—may see. Only the power of
natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at
will from the Greek power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from
his:—