Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/75

 that of modern England, France, or Germany, is town-begotten. Whence comes the contrast? From the different aspects not only of physical, but much more of social, life. The isolated city commonwealths of Greece saw beyond their own walls little but the work-fields of their slaves, or an exposed borderland which war and brigandage were perpetually devastating; where roads, if they existed at all, were as often the highways of enemies as the conductors of friends, and where the best of nature's favours would be a network of impassable rocks, to be valued for their practical defence, not admired for any beauty of their scenery. So, too, with the expanding town-sovereignty of Rome. Into the wilderness of nature and men uncivilised she throws her outposts of armed towns, and views with infinitely deeper sympathy the tiresome regularity of her military roads than all the splendid scenery of lake and mountain coming within the widening horizon of her empire. This is the march of human force armed cap-a-pie; before it nature is good for growing corn, raising men and cattle, for the soldier's ambuscade or the evolutions of horse and foot—and that is all. If the Roman poet turns his face away for a moment from the Forum and the city-folk to nature, it is (like Vergil) to nature humanised as the agricultural mainstay of man's life, or (like Lucretius) to nature humanised for the purposes of social theory. In the same way different social conditions in contemporary life may be observed to affect the aspects of nature; the same physical circumstances summon up different associations for the bards of the Homeric princes and for Hesiod, the singer of the people; the country life wears a different look for the medieval burgher and the medieval knight. Schiller tells us that the sun of Homer still shines on