There is a delicate compliment in this sonnet: 

  O violets, sweet and fresh and pure indeed,
  Culled by that hand beyond all others fair! 
  What rain or what pure air has striven to bear
  Flowers far excelling those ’tis wont to yield? 
  What pearly dew, what sun, or sooth what earth
  Did you with all these subtle charms adorn;
  And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn,
  Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such worth? 
  O, my dear violets, the hand which chose
  You from all others, that has made you fair,
  ’Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth;
  Sweet hand! which took my heart altho’ it knows
  Its lowliness, with that you may compare. 
  To that give thanks, and to none else on earth.

Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern spirit—­were, indeed, its pioneers.  They recognized their own individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as counterparts to feeling and for her own sake.

Over all the literature we have been considering—­whether poetic comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or of the finest details of scenery—­there lies that bloom of the modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define.  The rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no such marked individuality, to shew.

The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of Hellenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed.

Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal—­the countries chiefly affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and economically, but artistically—­and see the effect of the new scenery upon their imagination.

CHAPTER V

ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS
AND CATHOLIC MYSTICS

The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery of the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit.  Burckhart, praising this achievement, says: 

If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations and single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would seem to rival the poetry of the Italians.  Leaving lyrical poetry out of account, Godfrey of Strassburg gives us, in his Tristram and Isolt, a representation of human passion, some features of which are immortal.  But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean of artificial convention, and they are altogether something very different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and his spiritual wealth.

The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the depths of human personality.  For only to fully-developed man does Nature fully disclose herself.