But, as we often see, against some storm A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below As hush as death.... Ophelia dies: When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. and Laertes commands: Lay her i' the earth, And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring. Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the presence of wickedness. He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and subjective, than any we have met hitherto. Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands. CHAPTER VII THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE IN PAINTING The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that is, which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediæval poetry until the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in poetry--the sentimental idyllic period. We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, tradition, and mediæval custom were removed, and servility and visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic expression in Shakespeare.