scription as a fitting frame for human love-scenes, we shall be disappointed; for, though we may admire the Italian stylist's sonnet on the effects of the Valley of Vaucluse upon his feelings after Laura's death, he sympathises rather with city life and classical reminiscences than with the splendid life of Nature round about him, "I miss with astonishment," says Humboldt,[1] "any expression of feeling connected with the aspects of Nature in the letters of Petrarch, either when, in 1545, he attempted the ascent of Mont Ventour from Vaucluse, longing to catch a glimpse of his native land, or when he visited the gulf of Baiæ, or the banks of the Rhine to Cologne. His mind was occupied by classical remembrances of Cicero and the Roman poets, or by the emotions of his ascetic melancholy, rather than by surrounding Nature."
This was while the Greek revival had scarcely yet begun; no wonder that when the models which Rome had essayed to copy were unveiled before the eyes of Western scholars, their faces were averted from all sights and sounds of Nature save such as their classical gods—for gods indeed the classical artists now became—had stamped with approval. The beauties of the physical world exist only for him who can see them; and when the exquisite but delusive mirage of classical associations stole over the face of Western Europe, men of culture came to see Nature—nay, even social and individual life—through mists in which nothing loomed out clearly save the phantom men and manners of Athens and Rome. "For long the only forests or seas, gardens or fields, frequented by poets, were to be found in the descriptions of Vergil and Homer. In France, at least down to the time of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, the only voyages made by men of letters, the only storms
