“Much loved Bacchos where dost thou
Lonely dwell afar,
Shaking thy gold locks at eve
Like a blazing star?
While I thy minister am fain
To serve this one-eyed Cyclop swain,
A slave borne down by fortune’s stroke
In a wretched goatskin cloak.”
And thus simple was ever their appearance in the East. But, as I have hinted above, their very great leisure,[[1808]] the accidents of their occupation, and the grand and regular march of natural phenomena in those countries, often ripened their intellects beyond what the condition of a modern heath-trotter renders credible. Thus, in the mountains of Chaldæa, astronomy and all its parasitical sciences took birth among the shepherd race. From temperament and circumstances, the inhabitants of thinly-peopled tracts, if unvexed by wars, are profoundly meditative. What they behold in serene indistraction gradually rouses their thoughts, and presenting itself again and again, attended always, as the phenomena of the heavens are, by the same accidents, compels them to study.[[1809]]
But solitude is less surely the nurse of science than of superstition. The leaven, which in populous cities scarcely swells visibly in the breast, ferments unrestrainedly in the depths of woods, in the high-piled recesses of mountains, in the gloom of caverns, where nature invests itself with attributes which address themselves powerfully to the heart, and appears almost to hold communion with its offspring. Hence the wild mythologies of Nomadic races, which are not loose-hanging creeds, to be put off and on like a cloak, but a belief inwrought into their souls, a part of themselves, and perhaps the best part, since it is from this that springs the whole dignity and poetry of their lives. In all countries fables rise in the fields, to flow into and be lost in the cities. Observe the wild picture which Plato, in his Academic Dream, presents to us of a group of Lydian shepherds. It has all the poetical elements of an Arabian tale.