sensuous enjoyment; while darkness, storm and cold are regarded as repulsive.  This is followed by the pastoral stage in which we find the love of green meadows and of shady trees and of all things that make life pleasant and comfortable.  This, again, by the stage of agriculture, the era of the war with earth, when men take pleasure in the cornfield and in the garden, but hate everything that is opposed to tillage, such as woodland and rock, or that cannot be subdued to utility, such as mountain and sea.  Finally we come to the pure nature-feeling, the free delight in the mere contemplation of the external world, the joy in sense-impressions irrespective of all questions of Nature’s utility and beneficence.  But here the growth does not stop.  The Greek, desiring to make Nature one with humanity, peopled the grove and hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms, saw the god hiding in the thicket, and the naiad drifting with the stream.  The modern Wordsworthian, desiring to make man one with Nature, finds in external things ’the symbols of our inner life, the workings of a spirit akin to our own.’  There is much that is suggestive in these early chapters of Professor Veitch’s book, but we cannot agree with him in the view he takes of the primitive attitude towards Nature.  The ’open-air feeling,’ of which he talks, seems to us comparatively modern.  The earliest Nature-myths tell us, not of man’s ‘sensuous enjoyment’ of Nature, but of the terror that Nature inspires.  Nor are darkness and storm regarded by the primitive man as ‘simply repulsive’; they are to him divine and supernatural things, full of wonder and full of awe.  Some reference, also, should have been made to the influence of towns on the development of the nature-feeling, for, paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that it is largely to the creation of cities that we owe the love of the country.

Professor Veitch is on a safer ground when he comes to deal with the growth and manifestations of this feeling as displayed in Scotch poetry.  The early singers, as he points out, had all the mediaeval love of gardens, all the artistic delight in the bright colours of flowers and the pleasant song of birds, but they felt no sympathy for the wild solitary moorland, with its purple heather, its grey rocks and its waving bracken.  Montgomerie was the first to wander out on the banks and braes and to listen to the music of the burns, and it was reserved for Drummond of Hawthornden to sing of flood and forest and to notice the beauty of the mists on the hillside and the snow on the mountain tops.  Then came Allan Ramsay with his honest homely pastorals; Thomson, who writes about Nature like an eloquent auctioneer, and yet was a keen observer, with a fresh eye and an open heart; Beattie, who approached the problems that Wordsworth afterwards solved; the great Celtic epic of Ossian, such an important factor in the romantic movement of Germany and France; Fergusson, to whom Burns is