poets. Though they all have the same loving observation of Nature, their interpretation of Nature is not as advanced or stylized as the interpretation of the Tamil poets. As an epic poet, Homer is concerned with quick action and has no time for detailed description of landscape, but nevertheless Nature is the framework within which his heroes move. Ruskin has been criticized for his statement that "every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow and a shady grove". While not denying the beauty of the Nature similes and feeling for Nature both in the Odyssey and the Iliad, one is not surprised that a Grecian poet is not exuberant in the description of landscape, because Nature in Greece, though beautiful, is never so exuberant as in the tropics. There is as much difference between the austere simplicity of a Homeric landscape and a Cankam landscape, as there is between the blue cloudless sky over Athens and a tropical sunset.¹²

There is a delicate feeling for streams and fountains in Greek poetry which is not so pronounced in Tamil poetry. Then there is also the mythological colouring of Nature, so much a part of Greek and Latin poetry, which is absent in Tamil poetry. The Tamils had no gods of Nature like Dionysius, Hermes and Pan. They did personify the Earth, but the reverence never developed into such a cult as when Aeschylus says:

When the Greek viewed a rapid torrent, a stream, a fountain, or a line of high cliffs, he saw behind them an animate, divine spirit. Woods and hills, meadows and brooks, trees and branches, were peopled with divine forms of greater or lesser importance in the world of gods. The Tamils too people their glades, mountain tops and copses with godlings and spirits.

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   ¹² On Nature in Greek and Latin poetry see also H. R.FAIRCLOUGH, Love of Nature among the Greeks and Romans, New York, 1930; G.SOUTAR, Nature in Greek Poetry, London, 1939; W. F. JACKSON KNIGHT, Roman Vergil, London, 1943.