But from our own poetry we may get
specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the
conventional: for instance, Keats's:--
"What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"[284]
is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed
with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.
German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling
nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called
_Zueignung_[285], prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning walk, the
mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given
with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a
handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is
added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its
merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual
emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his
handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who will read his
_Wanderer_,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman
and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near
Cuma,--may see.
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