was essentially
a god of the wild, unploughed surfaces of the earth. Hence,
also, the frequent conjunction of the wilderness and silent
meditation and ascetic discipline. Schopenhauer suggests
that one secret of the spell of mountain scenery is the
permanence of the sky-line. Shall we say that one secret of the
solitary place is the turning in of the human spirit upon itself
because of the sameness of the permanent sky-line?

The effect of scenery upon religion was treated of in illustration
of the general principle of Nature Mysticism--the kinship of
man and his physical environment. No less marked has been the
effect of scenery upon art. The theme is now somewhat well
worn, but its true significance is seldom apprehended. For if art
is concerned with the realm of the ideal, or rather, perhaps, with
the real in its more ideal aspects, then it follows that whatever
has an influence on art has an influence on the spiritual
development of the people among whom any particular mode or
school of art may-establish itself. An interesting phase of such
influence is found in Geikie's suggestion as to the presence of
the humorous element in the myths and legends of northern
Europe. "The grotesque contours" (he says) "of many craggy
slopes where, in the upstanding pinnacles of naked rock, an
active imagination sees forms of men and of animals in endless
whimsical repetitions, may sometimes have suggested the
particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the popular
legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical
features in a comic light, and threw a playful human interest
over the whole face of nature, was a distinctively. Teutonic
characteristic." There opens out here an unexplored region for
original research. Taking the nature-mystic's mode of
experience as a basis for enquiry, how far is the comic a purely
subjective affair, concerned only, as Bergson contends, with
man, and only found in external phenomena by virtue of their
reflecting his affairs; or how far has it a place of its own in the
universe at large?

To conclude this slight sketch of the Nature Mysticism of the
solid earth, let us bring together an ancient and a recent
expression of the emotion these purely terrestrial phenomena
can arouse. There is one of the Homeric hymns which is
addressed to "the Earth, Mother of All." Its beginning and its
ending are as follows (in Shelley's translation):

"O universal mother, who dost keep