obvious. It may interest some to look for others, and to add them to the classification here given.

2. Though one mode may be more prominent in one poet, and one in another, yet no poet is limited to only one, or even two, of these several ways of adapting Nature to his purposes. In the works of the greatest poets, those of largest and most varied range, perhaps every one of these modes, and more besides, may be found. To find out and arrange under heads all the ways in which say Shakespeare and Milton deal with Nature, would be an interesting study for any one who is young, and has leisure for it.

With one reflection I close this part of my subject. Any one who has ever been brought to meditate on the relation which the abstractions of mathematics bear to the Laws of Nature must have felt how exceeding wonderful it is. A system of thought evoked out of pure intelligence has been found reflected and, as it were, embodied in the actual movements of the heavenly bodies, and bringing the whole Physical Cosmos within the power of man's thought

From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
From system on to system, without end.'

Such a one, I say, must have been filled with wonder at this marvellous adaptation and correspondence between the mind of transitory man

and the vast movements of the most remote and permanent of material things.

A like, though a different, wonder must arise when we reflect how, in the various modes above noted, and no doubt in many more, outward Nature lends itself to be the material in which so many of man's highest thoughts and emotions can work and embody themselves.

Of the poets and this visible world we may truly say,

'They took the whole earth for their toy,

They played with it in every mood;

A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,

They treated Nature as they would.'

He who has once vividly perceived the wonderful adaptation which exists between the mind of man and the external world-how exquisitely the individual mind, as well as the mind of the race, is fitted to the world, and the external world fitted to the mind,-must have paused in wonder at himself, and at the world that encompasses him, and become penetrated with an immediate conviction, deeper than all arguments can reach, that the reasonable soul within him, and the material world without him, which on so many sides is seen to be the embodiment of reason, and which yields up its secret to man's intelligence, and is so pliant to his imagination and emotions, -that these two existences so answering to each

other, and so strangely communing with each other, are both rooted in the one Central and Universal Intelligence which embraces and upholds both Nature and Man.

CHAPTER IX.

NATURE IN HEBREW POETRY, AND IN HOMER.

THE method pursued in this book has been, beginning with some general views, from these to descend to special illustrations, in order to exemplify what has been said of Poetry in a general way, by pointing to the several methods which the poets have actually followed in delineating Nature and her aspects.

It will be but to carry out somewhat more in detail the same procedure if I now adduce a few samples of the way in which some of the greatest poets of each age and country have in their works shown their feeling towards Nature. To exhaust this subject would require a large treatise. A chapter or two is all that can here be afforded to it. In glancing thus, which is all we can do, at a few of the great mountain-summits of song, many a lesser elevation in the long line of poetry, that might well repay attention, must needs be passed in silence. I shall begin with the earliest poets we know, and come down to those near our own time. In such a survey it is to the East that the eye naturally turns, and there especially to the singers of Israel; for, as to the view of

Nature which the Hindu Vedas may contain, this is a subject on which I do not venture, since at best I could but repeat at second-hand what others have said.

In considering the views of Nature presented by Hebrew poetry, it is not to the account of the creation in Genesis that we turn, but to the many passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job, in which the aspects of the outward world, as they appeared to those old seers, are delineated. Humboldt and many others have remarked that the description by the Hebrew Poets of the material world everywhere reflects their faith in the unity of God, and in His immediate presence in all creation. The world is described, not so much in detail, but as a whole, in its vast expanses and great movements; or, if individual objects are dwelt on, as in the Book of Job, it is as the visible witnesses to the transcendent power of the Invisible One. Nature is nowhere spoken of as an independent and self-subsistent power, but rather as the outer chamber of an Unseen Presence-a garment, a veil, which the Eternal One is ever ready to break through. These characteristics, which pervade the entire poetry of the Old Testament, are perhaps nowhere seen so condensed as in that crowning hymn of the visible creation, the 104th Psalm.

This Psalm presents, as has often been remarked, a picture of the entire Universe, which