3. Connected with this is the absence of all tendency to theorize or frame hypotheses about Nature’s ongoings. This of course comes from the pervading habit of referring all effects directly to the Divine will; and yet there is no want of philosophic wonder, for, as Humboldt remarks, the Book of Job proposes many questions about natural things “which modern science enables us to propound more formally, and to clothe in more scientific language, but not to solve satisfactorily.” Lastly, there is a deep-hearted pathos, “a yearning pensiveness,” as it has been called, in the Hebrew poetry, over man’s mortal condition, as when in images straight from Nature it describes his life here as “a wind that passeth away and cometh not again,” or “as a flower of the field so he flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Simple images, yet how true for all generations! HOMER. When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature, mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep. No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.