In this way Greek Philosophy made a start under the mode of the didactic poem. We may even adduce Hesiod as an example, albeit a prosaic treatment of this kind in its strict sense is only fully assured when the understanding is undisputed master of the subject with its train of reflections, consequences, and classifications, and instructs us from this standpoint alone in as pleasing and elegant a way as it can. Lucretius, too, in his relations to the philosophy of Epicurus, and Vergil, with the information he supplies on agriculture, are in part examples of the same type. Despite all their artistic adroitness they are unable to give their versification the genuine spontaneity of the artistic form. In Germany the didactic poem is new out of fashion; in France Delille, in addition to his previous efforts entitled "Les jardins, ou l'art d'embellir les paysages," and his "Homme des champs," has presented his compatriots with a further example of the didactic poem, in which he has treated physical science as compendiously through its forms of magnetism, electricity and the rest. 2. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY The _second_ type which we have to examine stands out in direct contrast to the previous one. The point of departure here is not from a significance already present before the mind in an independent form of its own, but from external objects simply such as natural localities, buildings, seasons of the year or periods of time, and the modes under which they are presented to sense. But as we found in the didactic poem the content persisted in formless _generality_ so far as its essential character was concerned, so here, if in a converse manner, the _external material_ is _independently_ set forth in the singularity which pertains to it simply as phenomenon without being drawn within the circle of the significances apparent to mind; and it is this particularity which is depicted and described in its external aspect precisely as it appears to the matter-of-fact consciousness. Such a sensuous content has no relation to true art whatever, except under the _one_ feature, namely, that of its external existence; and this can only claim art's recognition in so far as it represents the natural basis of _spiritual_ life and individuality, its actions and events, the facts, that is to say, which constitute an environing world; as merely external form separated by itself from all that pertains to such life it has no such claim. 3. RELATION OF BOTH ASPECTS On grounds deducible from the above, neither the instructive nor the descriptive type is secured in the exclusive one-sidedness which would obliterate every vestige of art, and we find in the one case that the external reality is brought into appreciable relation with that which is seized by mind as significance, just as conversely in the other the abstract universal is related to its concrete mode of appearance.