Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/288

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Ideas of Good and Evil.

which adds lightness and brightness to nature—

'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way—

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way—

''Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and

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