tivity of literature in the different kinds of animals and plants and scenery it depicts—the physical, or, as we formerly called it statical, relativity of literature—but even discover new aspects of its social relativity already discussed.
§ 16. The mere presence of a beautiful physical environment can do little towards the creation of a beautiful literature if social life moves under conditions adverse to sentiments of sympathy with nature. This man who, like Wordsworth's Wanderer, has lived among the wildest and grandest scenery earth can offer, is moved by none but petty motives, and reflects in his spirit neither the dignity nor the beauty of his native mountains. Another, who has passed his life in the grimy atmosphere of an English factory, surveys with boundless delight the ice-field of a glacier or the dizzy dangers of an Alpine pass. The sturdy, narrow-minded mountaineer is callous to sights and sounds of nature, whose gigantic features have not merely lost their interest for him from their constant presence, but have always been associated in his mind with very real hardships. Such common cases as these warn us against rashly inferring any sense of natural beauty or any deep sympathy with nature in consequence of her companionship with man, no matter how beautiful the dress she may wear. From under the rainbow arch of the cataract rises the witch of the Alps—but for whom? For Manfred, or rather for Byron's shadow called "Manfred," for one whose intense feeling of self has turned away from man to nature for poetic inspiration. What cares the chamois-hunter for witch or cataract? Search the pages of Greek poets and orators, and you will rarely find a picture of the varying forms of nature such as our town-begotten literatures of modern Europe present with rather monotonous frequency. And yet the literature of Athens, in a far deeper sense than
