Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/281

 let it not be forgotten that the latter is only description, not what Mr. Matthew Arnold has appropriately termed interpretation. Theocritus cannot see, makes no effort to see, Nature as distinct from human associations. He cannot, like Keats and Guérin, speak of the physical world "like Adam naming by divine inspiration the creatures." His expressions do not altogether "correspond with the things' essential reality." Nature for him is beautiful not because she is Nature, but because Lycidas, "the favourite of the Muse," with shaggy goat-hide slung across his shoulder, broad belt clasping his patched cloak, and gnarled olive branch in his right hand, watches "the lizard sleeping on the wall," or "the crested lark fold his wandering wing." Nature is bountiful for Theocritus because some human singer hears "the bees that make a music round the hive," and when this singer dies all Nature may "go wrong"—

§ 68. In Roman imitations of this Alexandrian poet Nature likewise owes her beauty to human associations. A Roman Daphnis sits beneath the "whispering oak" of Vergil; the Mincius has his "green banks wreathed with tender reeds," the "swarms of bees are humming from the sacred oak," and Corydon sings the delights of the summer scene; but it is the presence of man that the heart of the poet loves, it is humanised Nature he really celebrates. Between the Alexandrian and the Roman poetry of the empire there are, indeed, many bonds of kinship. Social conditions at the Alexandria of the Ptolemies and the Rome of Augustus were not widely dissimilar. In both courtly adulation had taken, or was