and shipwrecks with which they were acquainted, were those of Ulysses and Æneas."[1] Even in Chaucer we find the conventional garden of the Italian or Provençal muse rather than the landscape of England. Not only does Chaucer know nothing of Nature in the Wordsworthian sense—for his allegories and types bespeak an age in which there was no profound individualism capable of feeling "the silence and the calm of mute insensate things"—but his merely animal enjoyment of her beauty prefers colourless generalities to local truth; he would, perhaps, have shrunk as little from transplanting Italian scenery into England as from making Duke Theseus an English noble, just as Shakspere sets the London guilds in Athens, and places lions in the forest of Arden.[2]
Just when the resurrection of Greek thought was beginning to send forth scholars bound hand and foot in the grave-clothes of antiquity, while mental freedom, fostered by growing towns and decaying feudalism, sought to clothe itself in classical dress so as to escape the censure of Christian dogma—an excuse for much of the Renaissance pedantry—voyages of discovery in the East and West spread new ideas of Nature's handiwork in distant climes. From the letters of Columbus and his ship's journal we may feel the overpowering amazement with which the navigator gazed on impenetrable forests, "where one could scarcely distinguish which were the flowers and leaves belonging to each stem," palms "more beautiful and loftier than date trees," "rose-coloured flamingoes fishing at the mouths of rivers in the early dawn." "Once," he tells us, "I came into a deeply enclosed harbour, and saw high mountains which no
- ↑ Victor de Laprade, Le Sent. de la Nat. Chez les Mod., p. 57.
- ↑ Cf. M. Browne, Chaucer's England, vol. i. pp. 210, sqq.; Vol. ii, pp. 224, sqq.
