the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.

But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all
tragedies, such as the magnificent one:

But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.

The first player declaims:

But, as we often see, against some storm
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death....

Ophelia dies:

When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.

and Laertes commands:

Lay her i' the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.

Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every
detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his
dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a
sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the
presence of wickedness.

He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which
stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy
with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so
closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing
with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning,
etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and
everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and
subjective, than any we have met hitherto.

Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands.

CHAPTER VII

THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE
IN PAINTING

The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that is,
which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main
subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power to
compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic
idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1]
whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay
between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail
without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediaeval poetry until
the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear
perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies
interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture,
depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her
Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for
Natur