would require rather a year than an hour to do), as to give
you some idea of the position which his works hold with respect to the
landscape of other periods, and of the general condition and prospects
of the landscape art of the present day. I will not lose time in
prefatory remarks, as I have little enough at any rate, but will enter
abruptly on my subject.

78. You are all of you well aware that landscape seems hardly to have
exercised any strong influence, as such, on any pagan nation or pagan
artist. I have no time to enter into any details on this, of course,
most intricate and difficult subject; but I will only ask you to
observe, that wherever natural scenery is alluded to by the ancients, it
is either agriculturally, with the kind of feeling that a good Scotch
farmer has; sensually, in the enjoyment of sun or shade, cool winds or
sweet scents; fearfully, in a mere vulgar dread of rocks and desolate
places, as compared with the comfort of cities; or, finally,
superstitiously, in the personification or deification of natural
powers, generally with much degradation of their impressiveness, as in
the paltry fables of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from AEolus, and
of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil.[29]
Of course, you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher
sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, AEschylus, Aristophanes, and
Virgil. Homer, though in the epithets he applies to landscape always
thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet for rocks, seas, and trees,
from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest
interest in anything of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers,
the absence of sensation on these subjects is singularly painful. For
instance, in that, to my mind, most disgusting of all so-called poems,
the Journey to Brundusium, you remember that Horace takes exactly as
much interest in the scenery he is passing through as Sancho Panza would
have done.

[Footnote 29: Of course I do not mean by calling these fables "paltry,"
to dispute their neatness, ingenuity, or moral depth; but only their
want of apprehension of the extent and awfulness of the phenomena
introduced. So also, in denying Homer's interest in nature, I do not
mean to deny his accuracy of observation, or his power of seizing on the
main points of landscape, but I deny the power of landscape over his
heart, unless when closely associated with, and altogether subordi