Note 244 — Chapter XV

Nevertheless, oddly enough, the susceptibility to natural beauty and the power of describing it with the pen is often claimed as one of the good things restored to us by the Renaissance. The author of Cosmos, in that beautiful Introduction to his work in which he traces the history of the love of nature, observes that, “when the sudden intercourse with Greece caused a general revival of classical literature, we find as the first example among prose writers a charming description of nature from the pen of Cardinal Bembo.” Had the writer opened any of the monastic Chronicles in which his own country is so rich, he would have found that the monks, whom Bembo would have regarded as barbarians, had been before him as landscape painters in words, by at least six centuries.