Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/277

 The leafy trees and the creeping things the black earth nourishes;

The wild beasts on the mountains, and all the swarms of bees,

And the snakes in the deeps of the purple sea

Are sleeping;

And all the tribes of wide-winged birds

Are sleeping."

Again, while philosophers like Empedocles turned from the perpetual jar of human conflicts to physical Nature, poets like the Ionic Mimnermus were beginning to sing in a strain which anticipates the tones of Menander—his confession of human sorrow, his pessimism, as we call it in these Schopenhauer days, and his contrast of man's ephemeral life with the ever-renewing powers of Nature. His pessimism Mimnermus expresses thus:—

But the sentiment of Nature in Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, is something deeper than we can find in any of the early epic or lyric poets. Cosmopolitan Greece had now experienced the littleness of individualised life to a degree which neither rhapsodists nor lyric poets could have conceived. Men had broken loose from their old clan groups only to isolate themselves in turn from the State; and if the individual had thus become "free," it was at the expense of that greatness which, as a member of such corporate bodies, he once possessed. Therefore more than in the days of kingly heroism, more than in the days of city patriotism, men turned to Nature as symbolising that permanence which looks divine. To the glades, the springs, and the rivers Moschus turns for a voice of lamentation over Bion—to the trees of the forest and the