Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/133

 realized in the remoteness of ages, it still lives in the imaginations of men, and toward it, not poets only, but the most prosaic of the order of thrift are seen to be tending. Toil and turmoil through sixty years are endured, if only these may purchase a closing decade of rest—rural occupation—security—or, in a word, a sort of suburban resemblance of the leisure and the dignity that was long ago realized in the desert, by them of old.

The Poetry of all nations has conserved more or less of these elements of the primæval repose; and in fact we find them conserved also, and represented, in that modern feeling—the love of, and the taste for—the Picturesque. Modern, undoubtedly, is this taste, which has not developed itself otherwise than in connection with pictorial Art, in the department of landscape. What is the picturesque? A question not easily answered; yet this is certain, that any attempt that may be made to find an answer to it must bring us into contact with the very elements which already have been named; and which are assembled in the Ideal of the Patriarchal Repose. The picturesque could not belong to Paradise; for it finds its gratification in those forms of decay and disorder which bespeak damage and inaction. The picturesque is not simply—beauty in Nature;—it is not luxuriance; it is not amplitude or vastness; it is not copiousness; it is not the fruit of man's interference: but rather is it the consequence of an indolent acquiescence on his part, in