AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The encouraging reception of my “Development of the Feeling for Nature among the Greeks and Romans” gradually decided me, after some years, to carry the subject on to modern tunes.  Enticing as it was, I did not shut my eyes to the great difficulties of a task whose dimensions have daunted many a savant since the days of Humboldt’s clever, terse sketches of the feeling for Nature in different times and peoples.  But the subject, once approached, would not let me go.  Its solution seemed only possible from the side of historical development, not from that of a priori synthesis.  The almost inexhaustible amount of material, especially towards modern times, has often obliged me to limit myself to typical forerunners of the various epochs, although, at the same time, I have tried not to lose the thread of general development.  By the addition of the chief phases of landscape, painting, and garden craft, I have aimed at giving completeness to the historical picture; but I hold that literature, especially poetry, as the most intimate medium of a nation’s feelings, is the chief source of information in an enquiry which may form a contribution, not only to the history of taste, but also to the comparative history of literature.  At a time too when the natural sciences are so highly developed, and the cult of Nature is so widespread, a book of this kind may perhaps claim the interest of that wide circle of educated readers to whom the modern delight in Nature on its many sides makes appeal.  And this the more, since books are rare which seek to embrace the whole mental development of the Middle Ages and modern times, and are, at the same time, intended for and intelligible to all people of cultivation.

The book has been a work of love, and I hope it will be read with pleasure, not only by those whose special domain it touches, but by all who care for the eternal beauties of Nature.  To those who know my earlier papers in the Preussische Jahrbuecher, the Zeitschrift fuer Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, and the Litteraturbeilage des Hamburgischen Correspondents, I trust this fuller and more connected treatment of the theme will prove welcome.

Alfred Biese.

Published Translations of the following Authors have been used: 

SANSCRIT.—­Jones, Wilson, Arnold, anonymous translator in a publication of the Society for Resuscitation of Ancient Literature.

Latin and Greek.—­Lightfoot, Jowett, Farrar, Lodge, Dalrymple, Bigg, Pilkington, Hodgkin, De Montalembert, Gary, Lok, Murray, Gibb, a translator in Bonn’s Classics.

Italian.—­Gary, Longfellow, Cayley, Robinson, Kelly, Bent, Hoole, Roscoe, Leigh Hunt, Lofft, Astley, Oliphant.

German.—­Horton and Bell, Middlemore, Lytton, Swanwick, Dwight, Boylau, Bowling, Bell, Aytoun, Martin, Oxenford, Morrison, M’Cullum, Winkworth, Howorth, Taylor, Nind, Brooks, Lloyd, Frothingham, Ewing, Noel, Austin, Carlyle, Storr, Weston, Phillips.