to Hellas. The matchless fire and brilliancy of his eloquence played about this, his favorite theme. It seemed impossible for him to sink into the banal or commonplace when he sang of Greece. His imagination was fired by the glories of the past and revolted at the present's ignoble decay. His personal feeling likewise appears in every landscape, but not so much in melancholy lament or selfcentered musings. His nationality and his personality made impossible mere passive complaints. Such humiliation and decay were too unnatural, they must not and cannot endure. He was a Zechariah of Hellas and not, like Chateaubriand, its Jeremiah. For him in such moods the ruined Parthenon is not an object of beauty. He sees rather

. . . its broken arch, its ruined wall,

Its chambers desolate, and portals foul (Childe Harold, II, 6), and feels that

Even the worm at last disdains her shattered cell (Ibid., II, 5).

Greece is for him a land of death:

Cold is the heart, fair Greece, that looks on thee
Nor feels as lovers o'er the dust they loved (Ibid., II, 15),

and that superb passage in the Giaour beginning with

on to

and again

He that hath bent him o'er the dead

'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more,

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,

We start, for soul is wanting there;

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! (Childe Harold, II, 73).

Mountain and sea and river speak to Byron, but they tell him simply of the heroes of Salamis and Thermopylae and Marathon, such as who

fell devoted but undying.

The very gale their names seemed sighing;
The waters murmured of their name;
The woods were peopled with their fame;

Their spirits wrapp'd the dusky mountain,

Their memory sparkled o'er the fountain;
The meanest rill, the mightiest river

Roll'd mingling with their fame forever (Siege of Corinth, 406 ff.).

Byron was not, of course, blind to natural beauty in Hellas. At times he realized it vividly. "Eternal summer gilds them yet"-those Isles of Greece, "But all, except their sun, is set." The opening lines of the Giaour are a graceful tribute to the charm of the country, and especially those fine stanzas of Childe Harold (II, 85 ff.) beginning And yet how lovely in thy age of woe,

Land of lost gods and godlike men, art thou!

But the emphasis remains yet the same.

Nature in Hellas serves

Byron mainly as the landscapes in the old missionary hymn whose conventional phrases but serve to point the moral that

every prospect pleases

And only man is vile.

It seems as though it had been reserved for Hauptmann in contrast with his great predecessors to discover, or at least to describe, Hellenic landscapes as of intrinsic value for their own sake. The country is for him not a mere memorial to some martial deed or artistic achievement, keenly as are these appreciated; it does more than suggest meditations on the vicissitudes of fortune or awake the ignoble to emulation of a glorious past. No, these mountains and springs and trees and flowers exist for themselves, they are objects of a wondrous life and beauty quite apart from historic memories, and though they win a sort of eerie charm when the rapt mind feels every rock and blade of grass haunted by a glory that is no longer, they are more than mere suggestions, they interpret, they give form and color to the wraithy memories, and through and with them cast their spell.

Hauptmann has either not seen, or else he has disregarded, much that archaeologist and philologist would consider of cardinal value. But he came to see with his own eyes and not another's, and he has given us Hellas as he felt it. What was dead about the past had no interest for him, what lived and came to rebirth in himself, that was what he cared for; and as for the gap of centuries, that was no real hindrance, for he remarks,

When something is past and over, then it is of utterly no consequence for our powers of imagination whether it happened yesterday or more than two thousand years ago, especially when it is something humanly quite conceivable (pp. 243 f.).

It is true that he visited Hellas in March and April and naturally did not find the land as dead and dry as did Chateaubriand, who passed through in August, and it is likewise true that the country is less desolate, the contrast with the past not so sharp as a century ago. But that is not all: it is much more the eye that saw and the heart that felt which have made the Hellas of Hauptmann so different from that of his predecessors.

And yet you cannot believe that it is a mere fantasy land of the poet's own imaginings, a country without latitude or longitude as one of his German reviewers has remarked. Quite the contrary, even to one who has never been in Greece he seems to speak with the exact and convincing tones of a man who has observed keenly and put down only what he saw and felt, and it is worth while to notice just what that was. Flowers are for him the one never-failing charm of every landscape. "Why," cries he at Corfu, "will people persist in ascribing to flowers animal or even human qualities, and not rather make gods of them?" He calls them "these little divine beings, whose rare love-charm ever draws from us new cries of ecstasy" (p. 24), and again "Paradise will be a land full of strange rare flowers. The noble anemones of Corfu help one to foretastes of another world. You almost feel as though you were on a strange planet" (p. 40). But it is not only flowers; the grasses appeal also (pp. 34, 44, etc.), and trees, especially the gnarled oaks of Elis (pp. 68 f.). Mountains dominate all his landscapes, and with the shepherd mountain folk he feels the deepest sympathy. On the other hand the sea, which most travelers dwell upon, falls entirely into the background. Hauptmann is not at home there, and from his bizarre fantasies about sea-sickness at the beginning of the book, anyone can see he is not a good sailor. It is rather a landsman that has visited Hellas, and the earth, its life and odors are what he is best prepared to understand and value. The most perfect picture of this almost passionate absorption in the life of nature is that scene where he throws himself on the ground in the woods between Athens and Eleusis:

I am lying stretched out under pines not far from the convent of Daphni on the mountain-side. The ground is covered with brown pine needles. Between these needles very fine delicate grasses have pushed through to the light. But I came here enticed by soft carpets of white daisies. They drew me on as a group

of lovely children that you see nearby and with whom you want to play. Now I am lying here, and all about me on the ground the numberless little white sisters nod their diminutive heads. It is not a forest, it is quite tiny whitlow grass in which I am a monster, a real mountain. And yet they pour out a blessing that I have never felt since the days of my childhood.

I am lying stretched out on Olympian earth. I feel that I have returned to the beginnings of my childhood dreams. Yes, something nobler had been withheld for me! . . . . and I stretch out my arms wide and press my face gently like an Antaeus between these flowers into this beloved earth. The delicate grass bents quiver about me. The low tips of the pines breathe softly and secretly above me. In many a wise have I lain on my back or on my face in the sunshine, but never came such a power from the earth, such magic, never out of the hard rock, whose angles my limbs had to feel, did such a passionate joy pass into my being. . . . . Herds of sheep and goats, which wander over the gray stones of the valley-sides, greet from here and there with their ringing bells, which tinkle melodiously like the tumult of a babbling brook (pp. 121 f.).

And out of this rich sympathy with nature comes the serious religious tone that pervades the work. Not theological Christianity perhaps, though the Christ-figure makes the profoundest appeal to the poet's heart, and as he walks by Eleusis he thinks of Galilee and the Jesus who would make fishers of men. And so he feels the potent spell of the old religion of Hellas, the innumerable spirits that haunted every nook and cranny of the land.

Why are we afraid and despise as trivial to sing of our native landscapes, mountains, rivers, and valleys, yes, even to mention their names except in poetical images? Because all these things, which, as being Nature, have been regarded as works of the devil for a thousand years, have never truly been reconsecrated. But here gods and demigods wedded with every white mountain-peak, every vale and valley, every tree and shrub, every river and spring, have made everything holy. Holy was all that is above and on and in the earth. And round about her the sea was likewise holy. And so complete was this hallowing, that the lateborn, milleniums too late, the barbarian still today-and even in a railway coach-is permeated in profoundest wise therewith.

You must look for trees where trees grow; for gods not in a godless land, on godless ground. Here gods and heroes are products of the soil. They have grown up for the countryman like his fruits. The husbandman's soul was strong and naïve. Strong and naïve were his gods (pp. 84 f.).

The Acropolis of Athens, in a passage of great power, fills him with a deep, religious awe, "the strangest, most mysterious, and at once most meaningful rock in all the world.

Even today, far from all superstition of that kind that in antiquity lives and creates fancies among the folk, I feel deeply yet the power, the creative power of this belief, and though it is generally my own will that seeks to revivify the died-out world of gods, here, in view of this towering cliff, there springs up instantaneously, almost involuntarily, an ecstasy of the divine presence. I do not hesitate to affirm that all the tragic poets, including Euripides, deep as they may have been separated from the rude naïve beliefs of the mass, were nevertheless, here at the foot and within the domination of this ghost-rock, thoroughly impregnated with the fear of God or of the Gods, and with a belief in their reality.

The Acropolis is a ghost-rock. In this theater of Dionysus ghosts stalked to and fro. In countless clefts in this reddish-violet rock dwelt gods like rockswallows. It is a close-pressed over-peopled god-settlement; for the Athenians had yet, according to Pausanias, far greater zeal for the gods than all other Greeks. The way in which they founded asylum after asylum for all possible gods points toward fear. While I brood over such thoughts, I hear again behind me the bird of Pallas out of some cranny utter its doleful whimpering cry into the day, and imagine how at this call a shudder might well have passed over the breathless listening thousands (pp. 99 f.).

Another effect of this profound self-sinking into the natural poetry of the land is the creative impulse that it awakens, a sort of living into the ancient spirit. And as in Corfu the bleat of a goat that has been startled by the great reddish-brown sail of a boat coming up close to the shore brings to him the old fear of pirates which the lonely coast-dweller feels (pp. 44 f.), so at Athens on the Areopagus as he hears the rockswallows of the neighboring Acropolis:

I shut my eyes and feel myself profoundly and weirdly affected by the twittering. It comes to me as I softly repeat to myself: "The twittering rock: the twittering gods: the twittering rock of the gods"-as though I have felt something out of the soul of the naïve Greek of that time when men still honored the gods. Perhaps, I say to myself, if one can revive a sentiment once dead, I have thereby made also a small but real discovery.

And suddenly I remember the Birds of Aristophanes, and the joy of a discoverer suffuses me in an intense degree. I imagine that with this feeling, "the twittering rock, the twittering gods"-at the view of the citadel, the germ of that divine work first came to life in the soul of that freest of the Greeks. I imagine that perhaps I am living anew the purest, joyfullest moment, a creations-act of his true Dionysiac being (pp. 105 f.).

And yet this is only one side of the book, Nature and her appreciation. It is filled with beautiful fragments of criticism revealing fine