her. It was something to have risen above Christian anathemas of the material world even so far as to find the figures of lord and lady, horse and hound and hawk, more beautiful among the flowers of May and the singing birds. Nature is plainly assuming forms more friendly than were known to the kinsmen of Beowulf when they gladly saw "the Father loosen the bonds of frost," or "drove their roaring vessels over the mists of the floods." But this feudal sentiment of Nature is narrow in the extreme, socially and physically. "Among the Troubadours," says M. Fauriel, "we shall seek in vain for the least picture, false or true, of the country-folks' condition. These Theocriti of the castle know nothing of labourers, herdsmen, flocks, the fields, the harvest, the vintage; they have the air of never having seen brook and river, forest and mountain, village and hut. For them the pastoral world is reduced to lonely shepherdesses guarding some sheep, or not guarding them at all; and the adventures of this pastoral world are limited to conversations of these shepherdesses with the Troubadours who, riding by, never fail to see them and quickly dismount to offer their gallant addresses." How shall the life of Nature be observed from a broader and loftier platform than that of the feudal castle? How shall her immense variety of forms oust the stereotyped Nature-language of feudal song? What social expansion, what individual deepening of man's spirit, shall reveal in Nature sights and sounds not known before?
§ 97. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries we may watch three great influences at work in creating new ideas of Nature in Europe—the rise of the towns, the progress of geographical discovery, and the Renaissance. At first, indeed, the rise of the towns did not rouse any lively sympathies with Nature. The armed
