therefore, as well as teachers and artists and artisans, led a wandering life, especially the two latter classes; for all through the Roman world there existed a craving to invest life, so to speak, with an artistic atmosphere, as the immense quantity of fragments of statues found in all the provinces in part testifies. The sacred games also and festivals drew large numbers of persons, especially the Eleusinian mysteries, which had a great attraction for the Romans, many of whom, besides, like Apuleius, journeyed from one sanctuary to another, and were initiated into all mysteries, in order to be sure not to miss any divine blessing which was possible to be had.

The temples, indeed, were an object of special interest for the works of art, generally rich votive offerings, which they contained, as well as for the objects of curiosity, of various sorts deposited in them. Thus the greatest crystal Pliny ever saw was that at the Capitol, presented by Livia; while in the Temple of Concord might be seen the four elephants constructed at the command of Augustus out of black obsidian, with a view to test its reflecting power; and the pretended ring of Polycrates, in a golden case, presented by Augustus; and, in the temple of Venus, Cæsar's coat of mail made of British pearls. In the temple of Esculapius at Athens, Pausanias saw a Sarmatian coat of mail made of horse-shoes; and in the temples at Rome were Tanaquil's distaff and spindle, and a robe woven by her which was worn by her son-in-law, Servius Tullius; while, in the temple at Athens, they showed the coat of mail worn by Masistius, the leader of the Persian cavalry at Platæa, together with the sword of Mardonius. The relics of heroes, however, were in much greater esteem than those which belonged to historical times: for mythology and the early reading of the poets had made the world of fable much more real than that of fact, from the egg of Leda, suspended from the ceiling of a temple at Sparta; and the cup of electrum, the measure, it is said, of her bosom, presented by Helen to the temple of Minerva in Lindus; to the ships of Agamemnon at Euboea, and of Æneas at Rome, and of Ulysses at Corcyra; and the clay out of which Prometheus made man, long preserved at Panopeus in Phocis; and the hair of Isis to

be seen at Coptos and Memphis, which she had torn from her head in grief at the death of Osiris. Scholars, enamored of all that wondrous lore which has kept the world captive for so many thousands of years, loved to find the spot in the temple of Venus, at Trozene, where Phædra looked down upon Hippolytus as he drove his chariot by; and the myrtle with perforated leaves, which, in the madness of her love, the unfortunate Phædra had pierced with a hair-pin. They loved to sit on the stone in the harbor of Salamis, where Telamon had sat gazing at the ship which bore his sons away to Aulis; and to tread upon the spot where Cadmus had sown the dragon's teeth from which sprang armed men; and where, at Laurentum, the camp of Æneas had been; while they passed by, with less interest, the spot at Liternum where the elder Scipio had planted olive-trees, and the cliff at Capri whence Tiberius had thrown his victims into the sea.

Yet, though in Cicero's time they journeyed to Thespiæ solely to behold the Cupid of Praxiteles; and, according to Pliny, for the sake of beholding his Venus, which was regarded by many as the greatest work of art in the world,

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there were frequent sea-voyages made to Cnidus: it was much more for the interest they had in nature and in men than in art, that the mere travel of curiosity, if one may call it so, was undertaken and kept up. The feeling to which Atticus gives expression in respect to Athens was, doubtless, as true of the educated classes then as it is now. "Places," says, "in which we find traces of those we have loved and admired, make a certain impression upon us. Even my own favorite city of Athens affords me less pleasure, in its great structures and its costly works of ancient art, than through the recollection of its great men; for I look with interest upon the places where they dwelt and sat and talked and walked, and even upon their graves."

Yet the feeling for nature had a different basis, so to speak, from that upon which we build up our ever-growing interest in natural scenery. With us the enjoyment of nature is æsthetic, poetic, and religious only so far as all life and all beauty is religious; that is, more exquisite manifestations of the

goodness and the might of the Supreme Cause of all things. With the ancients, the more striking phenomena and evolutions of nature had a different significance; for they were direct exhibitions of the demoniac power which stood over against human life in no very intelligible relation, so that, while men wondered, they feared. If one beheld a grove of thickly-set ancient trees above the ordinary height, shutting out the sight of the heavens with their dense foliage, there was a mystery in the place, for it was manifestly the abode of a god; and so in a grotto running far under great masses of rock, where the forces of nature seemed once to have played so wildly, but now solitary in its gloom, the imaginative Greek was sure that he heard the very whisper of the divinity it enshrined, in the winds that rustled in its lonely recesses; while, in the dripping of the water from the roof, or in the gurgling of a distant, deep-sunk stream, he fancied he listened to the music of laughing nymphs, who dwelt unseen in its shrouded depths. And, again, what more natural for him than to erect altars around the source of a river bursting out of some great gulf of earth! for was it not the demon himself leaping into being? And so with hot springs, and deep lakes shut in by forest-covered hills; and trees of gigantic growth, like the willow at Samos, and the oak at Dodona, and the olive on the Acropolis at Athens, and the planetree in Lycia, in the monstrous hollow of which Mucianus dined with twelve companions. And, again, both Romans and Greeks, when they found themselves in the western provinces of the empire, travelled to Gades (Cadiz), or the coasts of Gaul, to behold the ebb and flood of the tide; and Philostratus records the belief, still prevalent on many shores, that persons sick unto death may not pass away during the flood, but only at the beginning of the ebb.

For the sea, indeed, the Romans seem to have had a special love, as all their literature shows, as well as the frequent remains of their palaces and villas all along the shores of the Mediterranean and elsewhere. For not merely in all parts of Italy and in the islands of the Mediterranean, in Sicily and Sardinia, were the great estates of the nobles to be found,

but also in Asia Minor and Africa. In Cicero's time, the whole province of North Africa made but six great estates. It is, therefore, not a mere rhetorical expression of Seneca's, when he speaks of large tracts of land cultivated by slaves in fetters, and of grazing-fields equal to kingdoms in extent; for, far and wide, there was not a sea in which the palaces of the Roman nobles were not mirrored; no gulf on the shores of which their villas did not rise; no height overlooking land and water from which the roofs of their magnificent structures did not glitter in the midst of pine-groves and planetrees and laurels, with all the accompaniments of arcades and fountains and baths. From his palace at Capri, Tiberius overlooked the whole of the beautiful Gulf of Naples. On the heights of Sorrento, the villa of Pollius Fabinus offered from every window a different prospect, of Ischia and Capri and Procida; and from all, the water, with the sinking sun, when the day declined, and the shadows of the forest-covered hills fell upon the flood, and the palaces seemed to swim in the crystal sea. And so with the lakes and rivers of Italy. How fondly Catullus clung to the shores of the Lake of Garda, where, at his favorite Sirmio, relics still exist of Roman villas, which covered also the picturesque shores of the Lake of Como 1

Yet, though the charm of the landscape was not unfelt by the Romans; though they visited spots remarkable for their beauty, in honor of the god who was supposed to have selected them for that reason, as the fountain of Clitumnus in Umbria, for instance, streaming forth beneath a hill of cypress, ice-cold, and of transparent green, with the ash-trees on either bank mirrored in its surface; though they could never withdraw themselves from the fascination of the scenery of Greece, with its idyllic fields and valleys and glittering mountains, so remarkable for their outline in that pure, clear air, and that strong, full light, with the magic of its works of art, that had come down for more than five centuries, brilliant as on the morning when they left the sculptor's hands, with a fragrance, as it were, of freshness about them, as if their bloom were never to wither, and the soul that spoke from

them were to speak on for ever, though all this made a journey to Greece like a pleasant dream, yet the conception of. the beauty of nature was much more limited with the Romans than with us. They had no comprehension of its wildness and majesty and vast, dreary mountains. The wonders of the Alps were unintelligible to them. They contemplated themindeed, with much the same feeling with which modern navigators have looked upon the ice-deserts of the North Pole. At a time when, year after year, hundreds and thousands of Romans traversed the Alpine passes, and Switzerland was inhabited by Roman colonies, the traveller had no eye for any thing but the obstacles he encountered; for the steep ascent, and the narrow paths along the edge of bottomless abysses; for the dreariness of the ice-fields, and the fearful peril of the avalanches. A feeling for the sublime seems wanting, the eternal snow of the Alps, flushing with the rising and setting sun, the blue glaciers and the whirling torrents, had no meaning to them. They never seem to have climbed mountains for the prospect, or, in fact, at all, unless it be Etna, for its view of snow-fields lying around the fiery crater; though Hadrian, indeed, ascended also to observe the phenomenon of the rainbow, which it was said accompanied the sunrise. As Humboldt says, the Greeks and Romans seem to have been attracted only by the idyllic charms of the landscape: they had no taste whatever for what we call the wild and romantic. And so it was in the Middle Age, even down to the last century; for Goldsmith, for instance, who ventured into the Highlands of Scotland in 1733, speaks with disgust of their wildness, while he declares the country about Leyden, with its broad green meadows and country houses and statues and grottos and flower-beds and straight walks, incomparably beautiful.

Undoubtedly, the pantheism which in recent times has more or less invaded all departments of thought has had an effect upon our æsthetic perceptions: for, consciously or unconsciously, it is the soul in nature that we seek to discover; it is its revelations that we seek to listen to, as we take refuge in its purity and majesty and ever-abiding calm from the littleness and tumult of our turbid human existence. But, apart