Title: On poetic interpretation of nature
Author: Shairp, John Campbell
Language: English
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NATURE ***



                                   ON
                          POETIC INTERPRETATION
                                OF NATURE

                                   BY
                          J. C. SHAIRP, LL. D.

    PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD,
                               ST. ANDREWS

                             [Illustration]

                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                      HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press, Cambridge
                                  1900



PREFACE.


This small book is the result of some lectures which I had occasion to
give to a large popular audience more than a year ago. I have since
re-written and re-cast them into their present shape. Yet the book still
bears the impress of the peculiar object with which the lectures were
composed, and of the circumstances under which they were delivered.
That object was to add a kind of literary supplement to several longer
and more systematic courses of lectures on physical subjects, such as
Chemistry, Geology, and Physiology, which were delivered at the same
time by Professors who are my colleagues in this College. It seemed to
me that some good might be done, if I could succeed in bringing before
our hearers the truth that, while the several physical sciences explain
each some portion of Nature’s mysteries, or Nature considered under one
special aspect, yet that after all the physical sciences have said their
say, and given their explanations, there remains more behind—another
aspect of Nature—a further truth regarding it, with which, real and
interesting though it is, Science does not intermeddle. The truth on
which especially I wished to fix attention is the relation which exists
between Nature and the sensitive and imaginative soul of man, and the
result or creation which arises from the meeting of these two. That is
a true and genuine result, which it does not fall within the province
of Science to investigate, but which it is one peculiar function of
Poetry to seize, and, as far as may be, to interpret. That the beauty
which looks from the whole face of Nature, and is interwoven with every
fibre of it, is not the less, because it requires a living soul for its
existence, as real a truth as the gravitation of the earth’s particles
or the composition of its materials,—that careful noting and familiar
knowledge of this beauty reveals a new aspect of the world, which will
amply repay the observer,—and that the Poets are, in a special way,
kindlers of sensibility, teachers who make us observe more carefully, and
feel more keenly the wonders that are around us: these are some of the
truths which I wished to bring before my hearers, and which, if I could
in any measure succeed in doing so, would, I felt sure, not be without
mental benefit.

As the audience whom I addressed consisted mainly of young persons whose
chief employments lay elsewhere than in libraries, I felt that I had no
right to reckon on any wide acquaintance with English literature. This
will account for the occurrence in the later chapters of many well-known
passages of English Poetry, which to persons at all conversant with
letters may seem too familiar even for quotation. If, however, the
passages quoted served to illustrate the views I wished to impress, I was
not desirous to travel beyond well-worn paths.

In treating of a subject which has in recent years engaged the thoughts
of many distinguished men, it could not but be that I should often come
across and use the thoughts of others. No doubt it is not easy always
to discriminate between thoughts that have risen spontaneously to one’s
own mind, and those which have been suggested by other writers. Whenever
I have been aware that I was using thoughts not my own, I have tried
to make due acknowledgment of this in the text. At the same time I
would wish to acknowledge here more expressly how much I am conscious
of obligation to three living writers,—to Canon Mozley of Oxford, for
suggestions received from his sermon on “Nature,” and incorporated in
my chapter on “the mystical side of Nature;” to Mr. Stopford Brooke for
suggestive generalizations contained in his “Theology in the English
Poets;” and to Mr. Leslie Stephen for some true and new thoughts in his
recent Essay on Wordsworth’s Ethics; some thoughts derived from the two
latter writers I have tried to interweave into the last chapter of my
book.

As to the book itself, I am well aware how small a portion of how vast
a subject it has even attempted to deal with. But, as the original
lectures were written, so this book is meant, mainly for the young. If,
however, it should induce any of these to look on the outward world with
more heedful and thoughtful eyes, and to win thence for themselves finer
observations, and deeper delight, it will have served a good end.

    ST SALVATOR’S COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS,
            _June 12, 1877_.



CONTENTS.


                                                                      PAGE

                               CHAPTER I.

    THE SOURCES OF POETRY                                               11

                               CHAPTER II.

    THE POETIC FEELING AWAKENED BY THE WORLD OF NATURE                  32

                              CHAPTER III.

    POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER                                        46

                               CHAPTER IV.

    WILL SCIENCE PUT OUT POETRY?                                        57

                               CHAPTER V.

    HOW FAR SCIENCE MAY MODIFY POETRY                                   64

                               CHAPTER VI.

    THE MYSTICAL SIDE OF NATURE                                         77

                              CHAPTER VII.

    PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY       87

                              CHAPTER VIII.

    SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE                   102

                               CHAPTER IX.

    NATURE IN HEBREW POETRY, AND IN HOMER                              136

                               CHAPTER X.

    NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL                                     153

                               CHAPTER XI.

    NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON                         170

                              CHAPTER XII.

    RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON                 193

                              CHAPTER XIII.

    NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, COWPER, AND BURNS              205

                              CHAPTER XIV.

    WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF NATURE                             235



THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.



CHAPTER I.

THE SOURCES OF POETRY.


Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals,
two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man
and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not
in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man, continual
reference, now latent, now expressed, to something which is beyond and
above both? This reference has taken many shapes, and uttered itself
in many ways, according to the belief and civilization of each age and
country. But by whatever mists and obstructions it has been colored and
refracted, it has never been wholly absent from true Poetry, and has
been working itself clearer, and making itself more powerfully felt, as
the world grows older. The Higher Life encompassing the life both of Man
and of Nature; the deeper Foundation on which both ultimately repose;
the omnipresent Power which binds both together, and makes them work in
unison toward some further end,—this has been a truth ever present in the
highest Poetry, to which great Poets have always witnessed. Therefore,
even in the most summary view of the domain of Poetry, we must not omit
this invisible but most powerful element. To express it clearly, we must
say that Poetry has three objects, which in varying degrees enter into
it,—Man, Nature, and God. The presence of this last pervades all great
Poetry, whether it lifts an eye of reverence directly towards Himself,
or whether the presence be only indirectly felt, as the centre to which
all deep thoughts about Man and Nature ultimately tend. Regarded in this
view, the field over which Poetry ranges becomes coextensive with the
domain of Philosophy, and indeed of Theology. Dissimilar, often opposed,
as is the procedure of Poetry, of Philosophy, and of Theology, different
as are the faculties which each calls into play, and the mode in which
these faculties deal with their objects, yet the hinges on which all
alike turn, the cardinal conceptions on which their eye is fixed, are
fundamentally the same. While Philosophy and Theology, in their striving
to attain distinct conceptions, are forced to deal with these great
ideas separately, and to keep them systematically apart, Poetry, on the
other hand, under the fusing and blending power of imagination, is, in
its highest mood, pervaded by a continual reference to all the three at
once, and will at times combine and flash them all at once upon the soul
in one inspired line.

It is, however, of only one of these three main objects of Poetry that
I now propose to treat—the action of Poetry on external Nature, the way
in which the poets deal with the outward world. In doing this it will
appear at a glance, and will become more clear in the sequel, that it
is impossible to isolate this one aspect of Poetry; that, even when the
poet’s regards are mainly turned toward the outward world, the sense
of God and of man is not far away. But even when we do our best to
limit the subject as far as may be, it is so vast in itself and in its
ramifications, that, far from hoping to exhaust it in these few pages,
I shall be well content if, when they are finished, it is found that a
few avenues of thought have been opened up, a few glimpses obtained into
truths which are real and suggestive.

Before going farther, let me say what I mean by Nature, for there is
no word which more needs definition. There is none, except perhaps its
counterpart, Reason, which is used in more various, often conflicting,
meanings, or with more shades of meaning, each passing into the other.
By Nature, then, I understand the whole sum of appearances which reach
us, which are made known to us, primarily through the senses. It includes
all the intimations we have through sense of that great entity which
lies outside of ourselves, but with which we have so much to do. For
my present purpose I do not include Man, either his body or his mind,
as part of Nature, but regard him rather as standing out from Nature,
and surveying and using that great external entity which encompasses and
confronts him at every turn, he being the contemplator, Nature the thing
contemplated.

The same external Nature which Poetry works on supplies the staple or
raw material with which all the Physical Sciences deal, and which they
endeavor to reduce to exact knowledge, subduing apparent confusion and
multiplicity into unity, law, and order. Each of the Physical Sciences
attempts to explain the outward world in one of its aspects, to interpret
it from one point of view. And the whole circle of the Physical Sciences,
or Physical Science in its widest extent, confines itself to explaining
the appearances of the material world by the properties of matter, and
to reducing what is complex and manifold to the operation of a few
simple but all-pervading laws. But besides those aspects of Nature which
Physical Science explains, over and above those laws which the Sciences
discover, there are other sides or aspects of Nature which come to us
through other than scientific avenues, and which, when they do reach us,
bring home to us new truth, and raise us to noble contemplations. This
ordered array of material appearances, these marshaled lines of Nature’s
sequences, wonderful and beautiful though they be, are not in themselves
all. No reasonable being can rest in them. Inevitably he is carried out
of and beyond these, to other inquiries which no Physics can answer:
How stand these phenomena to the thinking mind and feeling heart which
contemplates them? how came they to be as they are? are they there of
themselves, or is there a Higher Centre from which they proceed? what is
their origin? what the goal toward which they travel? Inquiries such as
these, which are the genuine product of Reason, lead us for their answer,
not to the Physics of the Universe, but to another order of thought,
to Poetry, to Philosophy, and to Theology. And the light thrown from
these regions on this marvelous outward framework, while it contradicts
nothing in the body of truth which Science has made good, permeates the
whole with a higher meaning, and transfigures it with a splendor which is
Divine.

Philosophy and Theology we must for the present leave alone, and ask
only what is that aspect of Nature, that truth of the External World,
with which Poetry has more immediately to do. To put it in the simplest
way: it is Beauty, that strange and wonderful entity with which all
creation is clothed as with a garment, or rather I should say pervaded
and penetrated as by a subtle essence, inwrought into its inmost fibre.
The Poet is the man to whom is given the eye that sees this more
instinctively, the heart that feels it more intensely, than other
men do; and who has the power to express it and bring it home to his
fellow-men. But if I were to confine myself to this I should not be
saying much. For the question would at once be asked, “Pray, what is
Beauty?” And it might be further asked, “Is it not as much the business
of the Painter as of the Poet to seize and express the visible beauty of
which you speak?”

Any attempt to answer the first question, and to explain what is Beauty,
would involve a long discussion, perhaps not a very profitable one. At
any rate it would lead me far from my present purpose. This only may be
said in passing. Light, as physicists inform us, is not something which
exists in itself apart from any sentient being. The external reality
is not light, but the motion of certain particles, which, when they
impinge on the eye, and have been conveyed along the visual nerve to the
brain, are felt by the mind as light,—result in the perception of light.
Light, therefore, is not a purely objective thing, but is something
produced by the meeting of certain outward motions with a perceiving
mind. Again, certain vibrations of the air striking on the drum of the
ear, and communicated by the nerve of hearing to the brain, result in
the perception of sound. Sound, therefore, is not a purely objective
entity, but is a result that requires to its production the meeting of
an outward vibration with a hearing mind; it is the result of the joint
action of these two elements. In a similar way, certain qualities of
outward objects, certain combinations of laws in the material world, when
apprehended by the soul through its æsthetic and imaginative faculties,
result in the perception of what we call Beauty. Therefore Beauty,
neither wholly without us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting
from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a
sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these elements
is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective
thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the
Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary
to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as
veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers.
And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of
the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us,
through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something
more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us,—a new
truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination,
not through the scientific or logical faculty.

If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture
of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the
existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth
as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This
is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I
once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who,
whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant
and absurd, used to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: “Oh, that
is Poetry.” Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native
hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful.
There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s
view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful,
fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking
nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if
it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry
be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest
forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time
on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is
because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to
have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by
the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I
hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, “the breath and finer
spirit of all knowledge”—to be “immortal as the heart of man,” it is
because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious
regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for
a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.

The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent,
if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that
state of mind which we call the poetic, the genesis of that creation
which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the
outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of
human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short,
any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or
the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to
the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of
reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow
of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognizable by
man which may not shape itself into Poetry. It matters not whether it
be a vision of Nature’s ongoings, or a conception of the understanding,
or some human incident, or some truth of the affections, or some moral
sentiment, or some glimpse into the spiritual world; any one of these
may be so realized as to become fit subjects for poetic utterance. Only
in order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever
it is, should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion
of the understanding, and pass inward,—pass out of the coldness of
the merely notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving
Imagination. Vitalized there, the truth shapes itself into living
images which kindle the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole
man. This is what has been called the real apprehension of truths, as
opposed to the merely notional assent to them. There is no quality in
which men more differ than in this intensity of mental nature, this
power of vividly realizing whatever a man does lay hold of. It is an
essential—indeed a primary—ingredient in the composition of the Poet;
but is not confined to him. It is shared by all men who are powerful in
any line of thought or action. This mental energy, this intensity of
realizing power, is the stuff out of which are made all who in any way
really move their fellow-men. It creates, as has been well said, “Heroes
and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the
pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants,
and adventurers.” In these and such like, the men of abounding energy,
who have revolutionized states and moved the world, the process had begun
with the vivid realization of some truth through the imagination; but
it has not stopped there. It has gone on from the imagination to the
affections. It has stirred the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hates of
the soul, enkindling them and driving them with full force on the will,
and propelling the man into action. In the Poet, on the other hand, the
process not only begins, but continues in the imagination, kindling,
no doubt, a real glow of emotion, but not leading him, as poet, to any
outward action, save the one action of giving vent to what he feels, of
finding poetic expression for the vision with which his imagination is
filled.

In this we see the distinction between the Poet and those other men of
intense soul, who share with him the power of vivid apprehension, of
making real through the imagination whatever truths they see at all.
They carry that truth which they have imaginatively apprehended into
the region of the passions and the will, and rest not till they have
condensed it into outward action. He keeps the truths which he sees
within the confines of imagination, and is impelled by his peculiar
nature to seek a vehicle for it, not in action but in song, or in some
other form of artistic expression. And hence the practical danger which
besets the Poet, and indeed all æsthetic and literary men, of becoming
unreal, if that truth which they see and cultivate for artistic purposes
they never try to embody in any form of practical action, any common
purpose with their fellow-men.

If then it be asked what are the proper objects of Poetry, what is the
proper field for the exercise of the Poet’s art, the answer, supposing
what I have said to be true, is, the whole range of existence; wherever
the sensations, thoughts, feelings of man can travel, there the Poet may
be at his side, and find material for his faculties to work on. The one
condition of his working is, that the object pass out of the region of
mere dry fact, or abstract notion, into the warm and breathing realm of
imagination. What the mental process is by which objects cease to be mere
dead facts, informations, and become imaged into living realities, I stay
not to inquire. The whole philosophy of Imagination is a subject on which
the metaphysicians have as yet said little that is helpful.

With regard to the working of Imagination and other so-called faculties,
Philosophers, I rather think, have cut and carved our mental nature with
too keen a knife. They have “murdered to dissect.” Our books lay it down,
for instance, as an axiom, that a definite act of the pure understanding
must needs precede every movement of the affections, that we must form
a distinct conception of a thing as pleasant before we can desire it,
that we must first judge a character to be noble, before admiration of
it can be awakened. I am not sure that this is the true account of the
matter, am not convinced that the understanding unmixed with feeling, the
pure intelligence untouched by sentiment, must first decide before the
affections can be moved. Is it so clear that in all cases we can separate
knowledge from affection? Is there not a large field of truth—namely,
moral truths, in which we cannot do so—into which the affections must
actively enter before any judgment can be formed? For, as has been
said,[1] “The affections themselves are a kind of understanding; we
cannot understand without them. Affection is a part of insight; it is
required to understand the facts of the case. The moral affections, _e.
g._, are the very instruments by which we intellectually apprehend good
and high human character. All admiration is affection—the admiration of
virtue, the admiration of nature. Affection itself then is a kind of
intelligence, and we cannot separate the feeling in our nature from the
reason. Feeling is necessary for comprehension, and we cannot know what
embrace particular instance of goodness is, we cannot embrace the true
conception of goodness in general, without it.”

If this be true of moral apprehension, if in this intelligence and
affection are so coincident, so interpenetrate each other, that we cannot
say which is first, which last, where the one ends, the other begins,
the same truth holds good in imaginative apprehension. Here, too, there
is not first a cut-and-dry intellectual act, and then a succeeding
emotion. From the first, in every act of the imagination, these two
elements are present simultaneously; though it is true that in time the
emotional element tends to grow stronger than the intellectual, sometimes
even overpowers it. Imagination in its essence seems to be, from the
first, intellect and feeling blended and interpenetrating each other.
Thus it would seem that purely intellectual acts belong to the surface
and outside of our nature,—as you pass onward to the depths, the more
vital places of the soul, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral
elements are all equally at work,—and this in virtue of their greater
reality, their more essential truth, their nearer contact with the centre
of things. To this region belong all acts of high imagination—the region
intermediate between pure understanding and moral affection, partaking of
both elements, looking equally both ways.

But it is not with the philosophy of the process, but with the results
that we have now to do. All men possess this power of vitalizing
knowledge in some measure. The mental qualities which go to make the
Poet have nothing exclusive or exceptional in them. They differ nothing
in kind from those of other men—only in degree. As one well entitled to
speak for the Poets has told us,—the Poet, the man of vivid soul shares
the same interests, sympathies, feelings as other men, only he has them
more intensely. “He is distinguished from other men, not by any peculiar
gifts, but by greater promptness and intensity in thinking and feeling
those things which other men think and feel, and by a greater power of
expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him.”[2]

I have said that the range of Poetry is boundless as the universe.
Whenever the soul comes into living contact with fact and truth, whenever
it realizes these with more than common vividness, there arises a thrill
of joy, a glow of emotion. And the expression of that thrill, that
glow, is Poetry. The range of poetic emotion may thus be as wide as the
range of human thought, as existence. It does not follow from this that
all objects are alike fit to awaken poetry. The nobler the objects the
nobler will be the poetry they awaken, when they fall on the heart of
a true poet. But though this be so, yet poetry may be found springing
up in the most unlikely places, among what seem the driest efforts
of human thought, just as you may see the intense blue of the Alpine
forget-me-not[3] lighting up the darkest crevices, or the most bare and
inaccessible ledges of the mountain precipice.

In illustration of this, let me give an anecdote which I lately read in
one of Canon Liddon’s sermons in St. Paul’s:—“Why do you sit up so late
at night?” was a question put to an eminent mathematician. “To enjoy
myself,” was the reply. “But how can that be? I thought you spent your
time in working out problems.” “So I do, and that is my enjoyment,”
answered the mathematician. “Depend upon it,” he added, “those lose a
form of enjoyment too keen and sweet to be described, who do not know,
after long effort, what is the joy of recognizing the agreement between
two mathematical formulæ.” If, in such moments of profound satisfaction,
our mathematician had added to his other powers the power adequately to
utter the joy of his “eureka,” the expression of it would, no doubt,
have been a high poem. “Poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human
knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language,”[4] or it
is the fine wine that is served at the banquet of human life. And what is
true of mathematical is still more true of other forms of truth. Whenever
a soul comes into vivid contact with it, there springs up that emotion
which is the essence of Poetry. And that this contact is so delightful,
that all truth and the human soul are so akin, that when they recognize
each other, the immediate result is this thrill of joy, this pure and
high emotion, what does not this fact hint of the nature of the soul and
its origin?

We now then say that as Physical Science explains the appearances of
the material world solely by the properties of matter, and it is its
business to do so, so Poetry seizes the relation of outward objects to
the soul and expresses this, and it is its business to do so. Physical
Science deals with the outward object alone. Poetry has to do with the
object _plus_ the soul of man. Or, to put it otherwise: from the meeting
and combined action of these two forces, the outward object and the
soul, there arises a creation, or emanation, different from either, but
partaking of the nature of both. And it is the business of true poetry
to express this. Any real object, vividly apprehended, we thus see, will
awaken in an intelligent and emotional being a response which is the
beginning of poetry. The depth and breadth and volume of that response
will, of course, be proportioned to the nobility of the object which
evokes it, and to the responsive capacity of the mind to which it makes
its appeal. And if it be asked, How are we to estimate the nobility of
any object? we may say that its measure will be the variety and strength
and elevation of the emotions which it has the power of evoking in those
spirits which are most finely touched. The deeper, the larger, the higher
the object presented to a soul fitted to receive it, the greater will be
the body of emotion with which that soul will respond to it, the finer
will be the poetry which is the expression of that emotion.

All delight we know on earth arises, as the wise Bishop Butler has told
us, “from a faculty having its proper object,” and the perfection of
happiness would consist “in all the faculties having found their full
and adequate object.” If then those partial objects, those shadows of
perfection, which are the highest objects vouchsafed to us here, awaken
in us a keen responsive thrill of emotion, whose fittest utterance is
song, what shall it be for a human soul to be admitted to the vision of
Him “who alone is an object, an infinitely more than adequate object to
our most exalted faculties—an adequate supply to all the capacities of
our souls, a subject to the understanding, an object to the affections.”
In the contemplation of this truth long pondered, the deep heart of the
philosophic Bishop breaks forth into a strain of meditation in which the
conflict between intense feeling and his habitual self-restraint seems
almost to overpower him. And what a view does this give of the essential
permanence of Poetry, how in the essence it must be eternal as the soul
of man! It seems to open a glimpse into the meaning of the mysterious
imagery of the Apocalypse, and to hint how it will be that the joy of the
Redeemed before the Throne can utter itself only in that new song which
none can learn but they.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus far I have spoken only of the feeling or emotion which generates
Poetry. Little or nothing has been said of that other side—the expression
of the feeling in words. The mathematician of whom I have spoken was
not, for all his joy, a poet. Why? Because though he had the material of
poetry within him in the intense joy, he had not the power of putting
it forth, of making it audible. He kept all the delight to himself, and
could not by utterance impart it to others. He was at best but a dumb
poet—a poet “in posse,” not a poet “in esse,” as the Schoolmen speak.
And the question arises, Is not a dumb Poet a contradiction in terms? is
it not of the very essence of a poet that he should be vocal? Is it not
in this, his power of voicing his emotion, rather than in his power of
feeling it, that he is distinguished from common men? Here we come on a
great controversy on which I shall not venture to dogmatize. Wordsworth,
we all remember, held that

        “Many are the poets that are sown
    By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
    The vision and the faculty divine;
    Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”

But Goethe and many others with him hold that without the power of poetic
expression there can be no poet; that as well might you speak of a
child being born which was a mind without a body, as of poetry existing
in the soul which does not embody itself in language; that, if we are
to divide Poetry into essence and expression, the garment of musical
words is indeed the more essential of the two—or rather, that Poetry
is non-existent till it has clothed itself in words; that in the true
poet the emotion and the expression of it come into being at once, and
are one. To this side Coleridge, I believe, would lean, for we find him
saying—“The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is
a gift of imagination, and ... may be cultivated and improved, but can
never be learned.”

On the whole, then, without deciding whether the essence of the poetic
nature lies in the capacity of feeling the emotion, and brooding over the
shaping thought, or in the power of projecting it in words, this may be
said:—Even if the potential poet may be silent, the actual poet must add
the power of embodying his emotion in melodious words. And this from no
conventional artifice of literature; but because, before the existence of
any literature, the natural expression of strong emotion is a chant, a
song. There is an essential kinship between the waves of excited feeling
within the breast, the heaving of the soul under the power of emotion,
and a corresponding rhythmical cadence in the words which utter it. Song
or chant and emotion are as intrinsically allied as word and thought.
The poet is the man whose emotions, intenser than those of other men,
naturally find a vent for themselves in some form of harmonious words,
whether this be the form of metre or of balanced and musical prose. The
rhythmical vibrations of his soul long to project themselves into some
sonorous medium. And for poetry to lie as it does dead in our printed
books, to be read merely by the eye, or, if uttered aloud, to be read as
one would a newspaper, is as unnatural, as emptying to it of its meaning,
as it is for the lovely wild-flower to be seen dried and colorless within
the leaves of a herbarium. Not of lyrical poetry only, though of it
preëminently, but of all high poetry, may it be said, that it is only
then fitly uttered when it is chanted, not read, and so it is with a
chant that most poets have recited their own poetry. As Wordsworth tells
us, “Though the accompaniment of a musical instrument be dispensed with,
the true poet does not therefore abandon his privilege distinct from that
of the mere proseman;

    “He murmurs near the running brooks,
      A music sweeter than their own.”

It is a sad divorce that has long been made between poetry and song. We
shall never know the full power of Poetry till she has wandered back to
her original home, and found there her long-severed sister, Music. Only
then, if they could find each other again, and come forth to the world in
blended might, should we know the full compass of that marvelous creation
which we call Poetry.



CHAPTER II.

THE POETIC FEELING AWAKENED BY THE WORLD OF NATURE.


If the view taken in the former chapter of the genesis of Poetry be
true, if any existence keenly realized may awaken it, must not that
material framework which encompasses us from the cradle to the grave
enter most intimately into our earliest and most permanent feelings,
and color all the poetry which expresses them? For are not the visible
earth and skies the storehouse from which imagination furnishes herself
with her earliest forms, and draws her broadest as well as most delicate
resemblances? Are these not the substance round which the affections
twine many of their first and finest tendrils? Next to the household
faces, is not the visible world the earliest existence that we know, the
last we lose sight of in our earthly sojourn? All his life long man is
encompassed with it, and never gets beyond its reach. He lies an infant
in the lap of Nature before he has awakened to any consciousness. When
consciousness does awaken within him, the external world is the occasion
of the awakening, the first thing he learns to know at the same time
that he learns his mother’s look and his own existence. For the growing
boy she is the homely nurse that, long before schools and school-masters
intermeddle with him, feeds his mind with materials, pouring into him
alike the outward framework of his thought and the colors that flush
over the chambers of his imagery. The expressive countenance of this
earth and of these heavens, glad or pensive, stern or dreary, sublime
or homely, is looking in on his heart at every hour and mingling with
his dreams. Nature is wooing his spirit in manifold and mysterious ways,
to elevate him with her vastness and sublimity, to gladden him with her
beauty, to depress him with her bleakness, to restore him with her calm.
This quick interchange of feeling between the world without and the
world within, this vast range of sympathy, so subtle, so unceasing, so
mysterious, is a fact as certain and as real as the flow of the tides or
the motion of the earth. Yet, though truth it be, it is one which Science
cannot recognize, and which she has left wholly to the poet. It is his
to witness to the fact of this intimacy—kinship, I might say—between the
movements of Nature and the heart of Man, to represent the relation and
interpret it. And though he may never be able fully to compass or exhaust
all the import of these relations, or to penetrate to the bottom of the
secret, yet it is one chief office of the poet to express it, to get it
recognized, to keep alive the sense of among his fellow-men, and to
interpret to them, as best he may, those enduring yet tender intimacies
that exist between their hearts and the wide world of eye and ear that
surrounds him.

This mighty process of influencing man, not only through his corporeal
needs, but in the more delicate recesses of the heart, the outward world,
it is clear, must have been carrying on unremittingly since the earliest
appearance of man on the earth. But what may have been the phases of
it in primeval times, before history finds man, is a question I do
not propose to enter on. No doubt, even in the most remote eras, when
savage men dwelt naked in caves, or cowered in abject worship before the
blind forces of Nature, and lived in terror of wild beasts, or of each
other, even then there must have been moments when their hearts were
imaginatively touched, as either the hurricane or the thunder awed them,
or Nature looked on them more benignly through the sunset or the dawn. In
that later stage, when the Aryan family had reached their mythologizing
era, and owing to the weakness of their abstracting powers and the
strength of untutored imagination, were weaving the appearances of earth
and sky into their hierarchies of gods, Nature and Imagination were face
to face, and were all in all.

The other intellectual powers of man were as yet comparatively dormant.
He had not yet learned consciously to disengage the thoughts of
himself and of God from the visible appearances in which they were
still entangled. But to trace the movements of Imagination through that
primeval time forms no part of my present task. Even without attempting
this, there is more than enough to detain our thoughts, if we attempt to
trace, even in outline, some of the ways in which the human and poetic
imagination has worked on the outward world in that later stage when
the three great entities, God, Man, and Nature, were in thought clearly
distinguished. Though in studying our present subject it may be necessary
for clearness’s sake, in some measure to isolate Nature in thought from
the other two great objects of contemplation, with which in reality it
is so closely interwoven, we must never conceive of it as if it were
really a separate and independent existence. However we may for a moment
regard Nature by herself, we must not forget that in reality we can never
contemplate it apart from the other two entities on which it depends;
that Nature as mere isolated appearance, without a mind to contemplate
and a power to support it, is meaningless; that all the three objects
of knowledge coexist at every moment, interpenetrate and modify each
other at every turn of thought; and that it is to the light reflected on
Nature from the other two that she owes large part of her meaning, her
tenderness, her suggestiveness, her sublimity.

The tendency to isolate Nature and to regard it as a self-subsisting
thing cut off from other existence, has been strong ever since man came
to be clearly conscious of his own distinctness from the world. In this,
as in every other realm of thought, progress is slow; it requires long
ages to get to the right mental attitude. Among the ethnic races, at
least, there were first the two periods already noticed—one in which man
crouched in blind abject terror in presence of the elements; another
marked by that brighter Nature-worship embodied in the Aryan mythology,
which, though past its prime, was still surviving when the Homeric poems
were composed. Then succeeded the time when, on the one hand, the mind of
man separated itself from the world and asserted its distinct existence;
and when, on the other, the thought of Deity, under the guidance of
reflection and philosophy, gradually extracted itself from the visible
appearances in which it had been so long imbedded.

When this great change had made itself felt, and when, at the same time,
out-of-door life gave place to life in cities, Nature in a great measure
lost its hold on man’s regards, and retired into the background as a
lifeless mechanical thing, without interest or beauty or any intimacy
with man. The material world, indeed, had still its utilitarian value.
It ministered to man’s bodily wants in the thousand ways that immemorial
usage handed down, and which science in recent times has so greatly
multiplied. If the refreshing presence of Nature still blended unawares
with the animal spirits of men, and cheered them when they were weary,
yet the multitudes cast on it no imaginative regards, and cared nothing
for the poetry which mediates between the eye and the heart. This seems a
true account of the mental attitude of the great civilized communities,
down even to recent times. And, notwithstanding the great movement toward
Nature which is said to characterize this modern era, one may well doubt
whether the sentiment has really penetrated the hearts of even the most
cultivated men. Such things must always be difficult to gauge. Yet one
cannot but sometimes wonder, if from the modern love of Nature, and
the much talk about it, there could be deducted all that may be set
down to love of change, imitation, fashion, and the desire to meet the
expectations of refined society, how much would remain of feeling that
was native, genuine, and spontaneous.

A few, we may believe, there have been in every age, and more perhaps in
this than in former ages, to whom, in spite of the prosaic atmosphere
that surrounded them, Nature was something more than a dead machine,
something even worthy of affection. Poets, too, were born from age to
age, favorite children of

    “Gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”

who had their hearts opened in a preëminent degree to receive the love
of Nature themselves, and to awaken it in other hearts by the music
which they lent to it. Yet neither the poets, nor the few apprehensive
spirits who sympathized with them, could do much to make head against
the prosaic ways of thinking by which they were surrounded. It was only
with furtive and occasional glances that even the poets of past ages were
allowed to look at Nature as they would, only by a kind of sufferance
that they were allowed to express the tender love they felt for her. The
feelings which they had in her presence were put down to imagination,
which was a faculty of falsehood, and the words which they used regarding
her were supposed to be tropes and hyperboles that had no meaning. The
science and the philosophy, as well as the common belief which surrounded
them, had settled it, that Nature was as inanimate as any piece of man’s
manufacture. And what were a few poets, with their weak singing, a few
dreamers, with their flimsy fancies, that they could withstand the tyrant
tradition, even though, half unconsciously, all their highest inspiration
witnessed against it? The instinctive faith of the poet cannot be
vindicated till, not in Poetry only, but by Science and Philosophy also,
the unity and the life that is in Nature are fully recognized,—till the
whole visible world, not in trope and figure, but in literal truth, is
felt to be the embodied thought of a mind which is in Nature and above
it, and which fills the Universe. Not till this conviction has come home
to man as a sober truth of reason, can we feel that Nature is intended
to minister no furtive, but a legitimate delight to the eye, to furnish
an interest to the understanding, beauty and suggestiveness to the
imagination, calm and restoration to the heart. Otherwise she becomes,
none the less for all her beauty, to those who fain would love her, a
cruel and all-devouring Sphinx.

Not, however, that the poet busies himself with the question as to the
essential nature of the material world, or inquires whether there can
be found in matter any ultimate and permanent element. The analytic
scrutiny of appearances is no part of his concern; this he willingly
leaves to the physicist and the metaphysician to settle between them.
Whether matter be ultimately resolvable into indestructible atoms out
of which all visible forms are composed, or whether all that impinges
on our senses be not at bottom one only force manifesting itself in
infinite change, or whether in the last resort matter may be only “a
permanent possibility of sensation,” or whether all force may not be
regarded as the direct and immediate action of the Divine Will,—all these
are questions with which, as poet, he does not intermeddle, though his
knowledge that such questions can be asked may quicken his sense of the
mystery of Creation which he contemplates. When poets have ventured to
make such abstract questions the subject of their poetry, they have not
generally succeeded. The poetic strength of Lucretius is not seen in his
expositions, able though they are, of the atomic philosophy, but in his
vivid representation of the manifold appearances of Nature, and in his
broad and profound sense of the one universal life that pervades them
all. The poet is in his proper place, not when he scrutinizes nature as
an analyst, but when he unreservedly accepts all her concrete appearances
as they come to him. Forms and colors are given him through the eye;
sounds as they reach him through the ear; fragrances as wafted to his
sense of smell. On this side of analysis there is enough, and more than
enough, for him. The outward appearances he feels more intensely, and
renders into words more graphically than ordinary men,—no other describes
them so to the quick,—yet he does not rest in them, but passes with them
inward and brings them into relation with his own being, or rather with
the universal heart of man. The ethereal blue of the sky on a fine spring
day delights every man, and something of the delight is no doubt due to
the mere eye, to the adaptation of the object to the visual organ; but
how much more—who shall say?—is due to the endless suggestiveness of the
sight, even though of its manifold meaning nothing may shape itself into
words. But it is the poet’s privilege not only to describe the outward
image, but to draw out some of the many meanings that lie hid in it,
and so render them as to win response from his fellow-men. It matters
not, therefore, if it be true, that all men can know of Nature is the
sensations it produces in himself. Even if this be all, it is enough
for the poet. Leaving to others to deal with its physical uses as the
feeder and supporter of the body, it is his to note how it exhilarates
the animal spirits; how it passes into the imagination and there becomes
rich in suggestiveness; how it entwines itself round the affections;
how fruitful it is in resemblances and contrasts to human destiny; what
large contemplations and high truths it presents to the reason; how even
for conscience, though it contains no direct teaching of moral law, it
supplies in its order and harmony the best visible images thereof. In
fact, quite endless is the wealth of meaning that lies hid in Nature, the
interchange of appeal and response that is possible between the world
without and the world within. There is in Nature just as much, or as
little, as the soul of each can see in her. And in order to see, the soul
must have been trained for it both by habitual converse with the outward
world, and also by converse with other regions of being, with other
teachers. For other teachers are not less necessary than the beauty which
lies in the face of Nature.

Poetry, we saw, is the emanation, the golden exhalation, as it were,
which arises from the close and vivid meeting of the soul and the outward
object. If this be so, the soul must needs contribute to the result not
less than the object which appeals to it. What then must be the power
and quality of that soul which is capable of taking in and making full
and harmonious response to the whole appeal which Nature is continually
making? There must be in the first place an eye to observe accurately
what it sees, combined with the power to describe this faithfully in
words uncolored and undeflected; in the first instance, by feelings or
habits of thought which may be peculiar to the observer. There must be
besides a sensibility to all outward appearances, as keenly alive to the
vast as to the minute in Nature; to the great movements of the heavens
and the breadths of light and shadow which they cast, not more than to
the delicate veinings that are in the tiniest leaf, to the sighings
that are among the reeds, and to the silent openings of the daisy and
the celandine. These two qualities are mostly found among those whose
childhood has passed in the country, who have known Nature as a household
friend that has entwined itself among their first affections. No doubt
there are cases of city-bred poets, such as Keats, who, having been shut
out from free access to Nature till they were full-grown men, have then
taken to it with an instinctive passion.[5] But even in these rare cases
there will generally be felt in their descriptions something exaggerated,
that shows the want of habitual familiarity with the ways of Nature,
and makes us feel that it has been approached rather on set purpose
as an object of artistic study, than known with the easy intimacy of
early friendship. If to these two qualities we add imagination; even as
penetrative as that of Keats, which went to the core of all it saw, even
this outfit of qualities would not be sufficient adequately to render all
that Nature contains of high and noble.

Such sensuous enjoyment of Nature, quickened by imagination, but
unbalanced by deeper qualities, has led more than one, and especially
in our own day, to an attempted revival of vanished Paganism, which, if
made the key-note of any Poetry, is destructive of true manliness and of
the highest human worth. By such a sensuous temperament, the forms and
colors and fragrancies of the outward world may be deliciously enjoyed
and vividly rendered. But this is all. The deeper tones that lie in the
silences of Nature will be all inaudible, unless the ear be overhearing
at the same time the deep music of the heart.

For the soul to apprehend all that Nature contains of meaning, there must
be present not only the eye keenly observing, and tenderly sensitive
to natural beauty, but behind this must be a heart feelingly alive
to all that is most affecting in human life, sentiment, and destiny.
And not only this, but in all survey of created things the upward
look, unexpressed it may be, yet ever present, toward the Uncreated.
It cannot but affect even the poet’s feeling about the most common
material things, what may be his regards toward that Unseen Presence
on which, not Nature only, but the spirit of man reposes. As he looks
on the face of earth, sea, and sky, the thought, whence come these
things, whither tend they, what is their origin and their end, must
habitually enter in and color that which the eye beholds. It can hardly
be but that a man’s inner thoughts about these things will find their
way out and color the observation of his eye. Even the ethereal beauty
of Shelley’s descriptions—his perception of the motion of clouds and
shadows and sunbeams—his delight in all skyey and evanescent things
too delicate for grosser eyes,—you cannot read them long without being
crossed by some breath blown from his own distempered moral atmosphere.
The “sky-cleaving” crags suggest to him heaven-defying minds, and
his mountains have a voice “to repeal large codes of fraud and woe.”
Byron,—though his later poetry contains noble passages on mountain
scenery, even the high Alps are hardly strong enough to lure him into
temporary forgetfulness of his own unhappy self, and his quarrel with
mankind. In fact, so closely and deeply united are all the parts of the
universe, that no one can apprehend the full compass of its manifold
harmonies, whose own heart is not filled with that central harmony which
sets it right with God and man.



CHAPTER III.

POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER.


But same one may ask, Is not imagination generally at war with reason and
truth? Is not the quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy as old as the
days of Plato? Did not he feel this so keenly that he banished poets as
false teachers from his well-ordered State?

Luckily we have not to answer this question in all its breadth and
complexity; we are not now called to defend the truth of Poetry in its
delineations of human character and emotions. Our subject confines us
to that simpler aspect of the question which concerns the action of
imagination on the external world. When the eye rests on the ranging
landscape, and the heart responds to the beauty of it, the emotion which
is evoked is as true and as rational as is the action of any law of
Nature. This kindling of heart in the presence of Nature may be said
to be “another aspect of reason.” It is not confined to any one order
of men or stage of civilisation, but belongs alike to the child, the
peasant, and the philosopher, if only the heart be natural and unspoiled.
No doubt the imaginative frame of mind differs in each according to
difference of mental habits, but in all alike it is essentially one.
It is a spontaneous and unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty of
the Universe—a proof to those who think about it that the Universe was
made for the soul of man, and the soul for the Universe, that there is
between them a wonderful harmony, the one answering to the other as the
harp-strings to the hand of the musician.

Take instances of this feeling, not from past times, but as it may
exist in our own day. The Yarrow shepherd, as he goes forth at dawn
and sees morning spread on the hills of the Forest, feels a momentary
elevation of heart for which he has no words, and of which he may be but
half-conscious; but in this feeling he has within him the first stirrings
of that which, when the poet fashions it into fitting words, becomes
an immortal song. His grandfather, a hundred years ago or less, when
he saw the first streaks of dawn strike some lonely peak, or the early
pencilings of light falling down into some hidden dell, embodied his
feelings of that beauty in the imagination of Fairies retiring from their
moonlight dances into the green knolls where they made their homes. The
Ettrick Shepherd, in his childhood, was perhaps among the last who had a
genuine feeling and belief of these symbols. They passed with him, but
though the symbols have vanished the same appearances remain, and awaken
the old feeling, and the feeling still needs a language.

So too was it with that Westmoreland dalesman who, as he walked with
the poet Wordsworth by the side of a brook, suddenly said to him, with
great spirit and a lively smile, “I like to walk where I can hear the
sound of a beck.” Beck is the Westmoreland word for what in England
is called a brook, in Scotland a burn. “I cannot but think,” adds the
poet, “that this man, without being conscious of it, has had many devout
feelings connected with the appearances which presented themselves to
him in his employment as a shepherd, and that the pleasure of his heart
was an acceptable offering to the Divine Being.” This is Wordsworth’s
reflection. I shall but add that his liking to hear the sound of a beck
was a proof that the outward sound had ceased to be a mere commonplace to
him, and passing inward, had awakened an imaginative echo which is the
birth of poetry.

Or take another instance—that youth, a shepherd lad, but more poet and
philosopher than shepherd, whom Wordsworth describes watching the sunrise
on the Highland mountains:—

                  “For the growing youth,
    What soul was his, when from the naked top
    Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
    Rise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—
    Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
    And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay
    In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
    And in their silent faces did he read
    Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
    Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
    The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form
    All melted into him; they swallowed up
    His animal being; in them did he live,
    And by them did he live; they were his life.
    In such access of mind, in such high hour
    Of visitation from the living God,
    Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
    No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
    Rapt into still communion which transcends
    The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
    His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
    That made him; it was blessedness and love.”

As we read such a passage, the thought involuntarily arises, What if the
said youth, instead of being a nursling of nature among the hills of
Atholl, had been college-bred, and crammed with all the _’ologies_ which
Physical Science now teaches, would he still have had the same elevated
joy in presence of that spectacle? It is the old question which Plato
asked, and which many since have asked down to our own time. In 1842
Haydon wrote to Wordsworth, recalling a dinner-party which took place
many years before at the painter’s house: “Don’t you remember Keats
proposing ‘Confusion to the memory of Newton,’ and upon your insisting
on an explanation before you drank it, his saying, Because he destroyed
the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism?” Suppose the Atholl
shepherd lad had been an optician, and understood all the laws of light
by which the effulgent hues of sunrise were elicited; suppose, further,
that he had been an astronomer, and as he saw the sunrise had begun to
reflect, It is not the sun that I see rising, but it is the earth that
is rotating on her own axis, and now turning her side toward the sun,
that causes all that I now see; and that axis is not vertical, but slants
obliquely to the plane of its orbit,—supposing these, and a hundred other
truths, which Physical Astronomy teaches, had come into his mind, would
he still have had that sublime joy?

Or suppose, again, he had been a geologist, and, as he gazed over the
mountain ridges, had begun to think of them as a record of commotions
that took place in far-back geological eras, and to reflect how the
stratified layers of which these mountains are composed had been formed
by the slime deposited at the bottom of a long since vanished sea; how
they had been upheaved by the action of subterranean forces; how some
of the great depressions which we call valleys, or those rents in the
mountains, now filled by sea-lochs, had been caused by the cracking of
the earth’s crust, while it was still a heated mass, glowing from the
primeval fires; how other lesser glens and corries had been sculptured
out of the solid earth by Nature’s graving tools, ice-wedges, glaciers,
rain, and rivers,—in the presence of such scientific thoughts as these,
what would become of the boy’s imaginative and devout ecstasy?

In answer, it may be said that whether the scientific man shall feel
this spontaneous glow in the presence of the great spectacles of Nature
or not, depends not on his scientific knowledge, but on his natural
temperament, on the amount of soul there is in him, underlying his
attainments. If he be so entirely the man of science, if the intellect
has so entirely absorbed his being that he never gets beyond analyzing,
comparing, and reasoning on the appearances he sees, then he will look
without emotion on the grandest ongoings of Nature; he will see in them
only a subject for investigation—nothing more. But if, as has often been
the case, the physicist be a man not only of wide and accurate knowledge,
but of large soul,—if his knowledge has become a part of him, has melted
into his being, then his heart will be free to kindle and rejoice at the
great things of Nature which he sees, as genuinely as the unreflecting
child, the thoughtful peasant, or the most spontaneous poet.

As genuinely, but with a difference: the eye of the imaginative man of
science will take in all that these others do, and more. His admiration
will be fuller, larger, more instructed. The knowledge that has been
gradually lodged in his mind, and become a part of it, will pass into his
eye, and enable him to see, on whatever side of the Universe he looks,
more complicated marvels, more wonderful correspondences.

“In Wonder,” says Coleridge, “all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends:
and Admiration fills up the interspace.” The last clause I should change
thus,—and Investigation fills up the interspace. In the first Wonder and
in the last the Philosopher and the Poet are akin to each other. Both
wonder, both admire what they see, but this incipient wonder tends to
different results. The unscientific poet, just like the child and the
thoughtful peasant, wonders at the beauty that is in the face of Nature,
and at its mystery, seeks no physical explanations of it, but reads its
moral and spiritual meaning, and tries to utter it. The man of science
equally begins with wonder at what he sees, but his wonder leads him on
to seek for an explanation, to search for the laws which regulate the
appearances, if haply he may find them.

Then comes the long interspace of toilsome labor, of painful analysis,
of rigorous induction. Experiment, analysis, deductive and inductive
reasoning, by which chiefly Science works, are intellectual acts quite
distinct from imaginative intuition and emotion, and, in some degree,
opposed to them. It cannot be that these distinct processes can be
combined in one intellectual act. They can hardly go on in one mind at
the same time. While a man is immersed in these scientific processes,
they preclude the poetic vision for the time. For many men they scare
away poetry from the world forever.

Not so with the largest, most sovereign minds of Science. Lesser men
of dry or narrow minds may be so entangled in the meshes of their own
understanding as never to escape from them, or may find more delight in
the cleverness of their own explanations than in the wonderful things
which they explain. But the larger minds, when they have done their work,
emerge in time from the study and the laboratory, and look abroad with
expanded vision and profounder reverence on that Universe, some small
part only of which it has been given them to understand. Kepler, after
he had discovered so far the laws of planetary motion, said that all
that he had been able to do was to read a few of the thoughts of God. A
short time before his death, Newton is reported to have said, and I give
the oft-told story in the authentic words, “I do not know what I may
appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy
playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding
a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”[6] A lesson surely to all
future investigators, and, as his latest biographer has said, “to those
especially who have never even found the smoother pebble or the prettier
shell.” These great men, so feeling, are in the attitude of philosophic
wonder—wonder both at part of the ways of God which it has been given
them to see, and at that vaster part which they feel to lie beyond their
vision. These laws which they have discovered, what are they? whence come
they? They know that they themselves did not make them, only attained to
catch sight of them. They know too that the laws did not make themselves.
They are beautiful in themselves and in their benign operation; they
are wonderful in their origin and continuance. This is what those great
discoverers felt. And when they stood on the utmost verge of their
scientific knowledge, and looked from what they had been allowed to see
out upon the great beyond, they were rapt into that mood of wonder, akin
to awe, which is the very essence of Poetry. Had they, in addition to
their great scientific insight, been endowed with the gift of poetic
utterance to express the wonder which they felt, they might have left to
the world a poem of scientific truth transfigured by the imagination,
such as has never yet been uttered.

Thus we see there is a poetic glow of wonder and emotion before Science
begins its work; there is a larger, deeper, more instructed wonder when
it ends. And either of these may naturally express itself in poetry,
though the earlier wonder has done so far more frequently than the later.
That the contemplation of the Universe does awaken this wonder in minds
of the highest scientific order appears in the instances of Kepler and
Newton. It has been shown in the case of an original discovery nearer our
own day than either of these—I mean in that of Faraday. The following
account of the imaginative delight which he felt in his scientific
investigations I venture to quote from a very suggestive lecture of Mr.
Stopford Brooke.

“Nature and her contemplation, says Professor Tyndall, produced in him a
kind of spiritual exaltation: his delight in a sunset or a thunderstorm
amounted to ecstasy. Our subjects are so glorious, he says himself,
that to work at them rejoices and encourages the feeblest, delights and
contents the strongest. In this delight and enchantment he was always
in the temper of the poet, and, like the poet, he continually reached
that point of emotion which produces poetic creation. Once, after long
brooding on the subject of force and matter, he saw, and I am sure
suddenly, as a poet sees a song from end to end before he writes it
down,—he saw, as if lit by a stream of sudden light, the whole of the
Universe traversed by lines of force, and these lines in their ceaseless
tremors producing light and radiant heat; and dashing forward on the
trail of his ideas, and thrilled into creation by the emotion which he
felt, declared that these lines were the lines of gravitating force, and
that the gravitating force itself constituted matter; that is, he made
force identical with matter. It was a speculation which abolished at a
stroke the atomic theory and the notion of an ether. Of the possibility
of the truth of this I am no judge,” says Mr. Stopford Brooke. “Faraday
himself calls it the shadow of a speculation. But who does not see that
it proceeded after the manner of poetry; that in it poetry and philosophy
went hand in hand? It was one of those inspired, sudden guesses which
come to the poet who writes of the soul, coming to the philosopher who
writes of the universe. In the midst of unremitting work at details
suddenly a vision of the glory of the sum of things flashed upon his
sight.”



CHAPTER IV.

WILL SCIENCE PUT OUT POETRY?


Here an interesting question suggests itself: What if the discoveries
of Newton and Faraday were to become no longer the exclusive possession
of the learned, but were to pass into the daily thoughts of the people?
Would Poetry then be any longer possible? Were the scientific view of the
Universe to become the popular one, were all men to regard the sight of
the heavens and the earth, not with natural spontaneous eyes, but as the
chemist, the astronomer, and the geologist teach us to regard them,—were
scientific truth, in short, to supersede surface appearance,—would it
be any longer possible to feel, as we look on the face of things, that
free and intuitive delight out of which Poetry has hitherto been born?
In a word, to express the fear which many hearts have felt, must not the
march of Science trample out Poetry? Is not Poetry destined to disappear
in this modern time, like many other things, once beautiful, but now
antiquated?

To this the reply is, There is no fear that it will, as long as human
nature remains what it is. If the view already taken of the genesis of
Poetry be true, if man is so made that the vivid contact of his soul
with reality or existence of any kind must generate that glow of emotion
which is poetry, then it cannot be that any enlargement for him of the
domain of reality which Science may effect shall be the death of Poetry.
For, like Religion, to which it is akin, Poetry is thus seen to be a
perennial and necessary growth, having its root, not only in the heart of
man, but in the constitution of things, and in the adaptation of these,
the one to the other. Science, however, though it can never eradicate
the poetic feeling, may modify its nature, or rather may enlarge its
range. But let it be clearly understood how it may do this. The processes
of Science and of Poetry are radically distinct, and cannot be blended
without confusion and injury to both. Experiment, analysis, reasoning
inductive and deductive, these are the means by which Science makes its
advances, and with these Poetry cannot rightly intermeddle. Imaginatively
to contemplate the spectacle of the world is possible before Science
has begun, it is possible, also, after it has completed its work. But
it is not possible to combine imaginative contemplation and scientific
investigation at the same time, and in one mental act. Only after
analysis and reasoning have done their work and secured their results
is the man of science free to look abroad on Nature with a poetic eye.
Analysis and experimentalizing cannot by any possibility be made poetic,
but their results may. Every new province of knowledge which Science
conquers, Poetry may in time enter into and possess. But this can only
be done gradually. Before imagination can take up and mould the results
of Science, these must have ceased to be difficult, laborious, abstruse.
The knowledge of them must have become to the poet himself, and in some
measure to his audience, familiar, habitual, spontaneous. And here we
see how finely Science and Poetry may interact and minister each to the
other. If it be the duty of Science beneath seeming confusion to search
for order, and its happiness to find it everywhere,—an order more vast,
more various, more deeply penetrating, more intimate and minute than
uninstructed men ever dreamed of,—wherever it reveals the presence of
this, does it not open new fields for the imagination to appropriate?
For what is order but the presence of thought, the ground of all beauty,
the witness to the actual nearness of an upholding and moving Spirit?
This is the vast new domain which Science is unveiling and spreading out
before the eye of Poetry. And Poetry, receiving this large benefit, may
repay the debt by using her own peculiar powers to familiarize men’s
thoughts with the new regions which Science has won for them. If there
is any office which Imagination can fulfill, it is this. She can help
to bring home to the mind things which, though true, are yet strange,
distant, perhaps distasteful. She can mediate between the warm, household
feelings and the cold and remote acquisitions of new knowledge, and make
the heart feel no longer “bewildered and oppressed” among the vast extent
and gigantic movements of the Universe, but at home amongst them, soothed
and tranquillized. Not, however, out of her own resources alone can
Imagination do this. She must bring from the treasure-house of Religion
moral and spiritual lights and impulses, and with these interpenetrate
the cold, boundless spaces which the telescope has revealed. Some
beginning of such a reconciling process we may see here and there in
those poems of “In Memoriam” in which the Poet-Laureate has finely
inwrought new truths of Science into the texture of yearning affection
and spiritual meditation. Even where the views of Science are not only
strange, but even at first crude and repulsive, Imagination can soften
their asperity and subdue their harsher features. Just as when a railway
has been driven through some beautiful and sequestered scene, outraging
its quiet and scarring its loveliness, we see Nature in time return,
and “busy with a hand of healing,” cover the raw wounds with grass, and
strew artificial mounds and cuttings with underwood and flowers. It
seems then that while Science gives to Poetry new regions to work upon,
Poetry repays the debt by familiarizing and humanizing what Science has
discovered. Such is their mutual interaction.

Mr. Stopford Brooke has told us that if on the scientific insight of
Faraday could be engrafted the poetic genius of Byron, the result would
be a poem of the kind “for which the world waits.” For “to write on the
universal ideas of Science,” he says, “through the emotions which they
excite, will be part of the work of future poets of Nature.” Likely
enough it may be so. For if Poetry were to leave large regions of new
thought unappropriated, being thus divorced from the onward march of
thought, it would speedily become obsolete and unreal. But let us well
understand what are the conditions of such poetry, the conditions on
which alone Imagination can wed itself to scientific fact. The poet who
shall sing the songs of Science must first be perfectly at home in all
the new truths, must move among them with as much ease and freedom as
ordinary men now do among the natural appearances of things. And not the
poet only, but his audience must move with ease along the pathways which
Science has opened. For if the poet has first to instruct his readers
in the facts which he wishes imaginatively to render, while he expounds
he will become frigid and unpoetic. Just as Lucretius is dull in those
parts of his poem in which he has to argue out and to expound the Atomic
Theory, and only then soars when, exposition left behind, he can give
himself up to contemplate the great elemental movements, the vast life
that pervades the sum of things. For in order that any truth or view of
things may become fit material for poetry, it must first cease to live
exclusively in the study or the laboratory, and come down and make itself
palpable in the market-place. The scientific truths must be no longer
strange, remote, or technical. If they have not yet passed into popular
thought, they must at least have become the habitual possession of the
more educated before the poet can successfully deal with them. This is
the necessary condition of their poetic treatment. Wordsworth, in one
of his Prefaces, has stated so clearly the truth on this subject that I
cannot do better than give his words. “If the time should ever come,” he
says, “when what is now called Science becomes familiarized to men, then
the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralogist,
will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be
employed. He will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, he
will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
of Science itself. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and
genuine inmate of the household of man.”

Science therefore may in some measure modify Poetry, may enlarge its
range, may reveal new phases of it, but can never supersede it. The
imaginative view of things which Poetry expresses is not one which can
grow obsolete. It is not the child of any one particular stage of
knowledge or civilization, which can be put aside when a higher stage has
been reached. Any state of knowledge can give scope to it. Any aspect
of the world, that seen by the savage as well as that of the sage, can
awaken that imaginative glow of mind, that thrill of emotion, which,
expressed in fitting words, is called Poetry. Only, as has been said
above, before any aspect of nature, or fact of life, or truth of science,
may be capable of poetic treatment, it must have become habitual and easy
to the mind of the poet, and in some measure to that of his audience. In
the poet’s mind, at least, it must have passed out of the region of mere
head-notions into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative intuition, and,
vitalized there, must have bodied itself into beautiful form and flushed
into glowing color. For, to repeat once again what has been said at the
outset, Poetry originates in the vivid contact of the soul—not of the
understanding merely, but of the whole soul—with reality of any kind; and
it is the utterance of the joy that arises, of the glow that is felt,
from such soul-contact with the reality of things. When that reality has
passed inward, and kindled the soul to “a white heat of emotion,” then it
is that genuine Poetry is born.



CHAPTER V.

HOW FAR SCIENCE MAY MODIFY POETRY.


It may be worth while to dwell a little longer on the way in which Poetry
and Science respectively deal with external Nature, noticing in what
respects their methods agree, in what they differ, wherein they seem to
modify each other, and how each aims at a separate and distinct end of
its own.

The first thing to remark is, that in the presence of Nature the poet and
the man of science are alike observers. But in respect of time the poet
has the precedence. Long before the botanist had applied his microscope
to the flower, or the geologist his hammer to the rock, the poet’s eye
had rested upon these objects, and noted the beauty of their lineaments.
The poets were the first observers, and the earliest and greatest poets
were the most exact and faithful in their observations. In the Psalms
of Israel and in the Poems of Homer how many of the most beautiful and
affecting images of Nature have been seized and embalmed in language
which for exactness can not be surpassed, and for beauty can never grow
obsolete! Indeed, fidelity to the truth of Nature, even in its minutest
details, may be almost taken as a special note of the higher order of
poets. It is not Homer but Dryden who to express the silence of night
makes the drowsy mountains nod. It is a vulgar error which supposes that
it is the privilege of imagination to absolve the poet from the duty
of exact truth, and to set him free to make of Nature what he pleases.
True imagination shows itself by nothing more than by that exquisite
sensibility to beauty which makes it love and reverence Nature as it is.
It feels instinctively that “He hath made everything beautiful in his
time;” therefore it would not displace a blade of grass nor neglect the
veining of a single leaf. Of course, from the touch of a great poet,
the commonest objects acquire something more than exactness and truth
of detail; they become forms of beauty, vehicles of human sentiment and
emotion. But before they can be so used, fidelity to fact must first be
secured. They cannot be made symbols of higher truth unless justice has
first been done to the truth of fact concerning them. Hence it is that
the works of the great poets of all ages are very repositories in which
the features and ever-changing aspects of the outward world are rendered
with the most loving fidelity and “vivid exactness.” This is one very
delicate service which genuine poets have done to their fellow-men. They
have by an instinct of their own noted the appearance of earth and sky,
and kept alive the sense of their beauty during long ages when the world
was little heedful of these things. How many are there who would own that
there are features in the landscape, wild-flowers by the way-side, tender
lights in the sky, which they would have passed forever unheeded, had not
the remembered words of some poet awakened their eye to look on these
things and to discern their beauty! Who ever now sees the “wee, modest,
crimson-tipped flower,” and notes the peculiar coloring of the petals,
without a new feeling of beauty in the flower itself, and of the added
beauty it has received since the eye of Burns dwelt so lovingly upon it!

The observation of the world around them in those early poets, clear and
transparent, was instinctive, almost unconscious. It proceeded not by
rules or method, but was spontaneous, prompted by love. What Mrs. Hemans
finely says of Walter Scott among his own woods at Abbotsford, may be
said of all the great poets in their converse with Nature—

    “Where every tree had music of its own,
    To his quick ear of knowledge taught by love.”

Likely enough it will be said, that spontaneous, child-like kind
of observation was all well enough in the pre-scientific era. But
now, in this day of trained observation and experiment, have not the
magnifying-glass of the botanist and the crucible of the chemist quite
put out the poet’s vocation as an observer of natural things? Have
not these taught us truth about Nature, so much more close, exact,
and penetrating, as to have discredited altogether that mere surface
observation which is all that is possible to the poet? In the presence
of this newer, more sifting investigation, can the imagery of the poets
any longer live? Has not the rigorous analysis of modern times, and the
knowledge thence accruing, abolished the worth and meaning of that first
random information gathered by the eye?

In reply, may it not be said the observations of the poet have real
meaning and truth, but it is a different kind of truth which the poet and
the man of science extract from the same object? The poet, in as far as
he is an observer at all, must be as true and as accurate in the details
he gives as the man of science is, but the end which each seeks in his
observation is different. In examining a flower, the botanist, when he
has noted the number of stamens and petals, the form of the pistil, the
corolla, the calyx, and other floral organs,—when he has registered
these, and so given the flower its place in his system, his work is done.
These things, too, the poet observes, and in his descriptions, if he
does not give them a place, he must at least not contravene them; but he
observes them as means to a further end. That end is to see and express
the loveliness that is in the flower, not only the beauty of color and
of form, but the sentiment which, so to speak, looks out from it, and
which is meant to awaken in us an answering emotion. For this end he
must observe accurately, since the form and hues of the flower discerned
by the eye are a large part of what gives it relation and meaning to the
soul. The outward facts of the wild-flowers he must not distort, but
reverently observe them; but, when observed, he must not rest in them,
but see them as they stand related to the earth out of which they grow,
to the wood which surrounds them, to the sky above them, which waits on
them with its ministries of dew, rain, and sunshine,—indeed, to the whole
world, of which they are a part, and to the human heart, to which they
tenderly appeal.

On this wide subject, the bearing of scientific on poetic truth, I know
not where can be found truer and more suggestive teaching than that
contained in Mr. Ruskin’s great work on Modern Painters. Each volume
of that work, which has influenced so powerfully the painting of our
time, has much to teach to the poet and to the student of Poetry. In the
Preface to the Second Edition many of the principles expanded throughout
the work are condensed. From that Preface I venture to quote one or two
passages which throw much light on the subject of our discussion:—

“The sculptor is not permitted to be wanting either in knowledge or
expression of anatomical detail.... That which to the anatomist is the
end is to the sculptor the means. The former desires details for their
own sake; the latter that by means of them he may kindle his work
with life, and stamp it with beauty. And so in landscape: botanical
or geological details are not to be given as a matter of curiosity or
subject of search, but as the ultimate elements of every species of
expression and order of loveliness.”

Again: “Details alone, and unreferred to a final purpose, are the sign of
a tyro’s work.... Details perfect in unity and contributing to a final
purpose are the sign of the production of a consummate master. It is not
details sought for their own sake ... which constitute great art,—they
are the lowest, most contemptible art; but it is detail referred to a
great end, sought for the sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in
the slightest and least of God’s works, and treated in a manly, broad,
and impressive manner. There may be as much greatness of mind, as much
nobility of manner, in a master’s treatment of the smallest features, as
in his management of the more vast; and this greatness of manner chiefly
consists in seizing the specific character of the object, together with
all the great qualities of beauty which it has in common with the higher
orders of existence.”

Once more: “This is the difference between the mere botanist’s knowledge
of plants and the great poet’s or painter’s knowledge of them. The
one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium,
the other that he may render them vehicles of expression and emotion.
The one counts the stamens, affixes a name, and is content; the other
observes every character of the plant’s color and form; considering each
of its attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its lines of
grace or energy, rigidity or repose, notes the feebleness or the vigor,
the serenity or tremulousness of its hues; observes its local habits,
its love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by
particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the features
of the situations it inhabits and the ministering agencies necessary to
its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living creature, with
histories written on its leaves and passions breathing in its motion. Its
occurrence in his picture is no mere point of color, no meaningless spark
of light. It is a voice rising from the earth, a new chord of the mind’s
music, a necessary note in the harmony of his picture, contributing alike
to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less to its loveliness and its
truth.”

If in the observation of Nature the ends which the poet has in view
and the effects which he brings out are different from those aimed at
by the man of science, not less distinct are the mental powers which
each brings into play. The man of science investigates that he may
reach rigid accuracy of fact, and this he does by the exercise of the
dry understanding, and by the use of the analytic method. The poet
contemplates the single objects or the vast spectacle of Nature, in
order that he may discern the beauty that pervades both the parts and
the whole, and that he may apprehend the intimations—the great thoughts,
I might call them—which come to him through that beauty, and which make
their appeal to the power of imaginative sympathy within him. Nature,
whether in detail or as a whole, he regards in the relation it bears,
whether of likeness or of contrast, to the soul, the emotions, and the
destiny of man. But this relation he must seize, not by neglecting or
setting aside facts, but by noting them with all the fidelity consistent
with his main purpose.

But it may be well to mark more definitely some of the ways in which the
extension of natural science in modern times has reacted on the work of
the poet.

_1st._ It had fallen in with, though it has not originated, that
remarkable change in the mental attitude in which modern times stand
toward Nature, a change of which more will have to be said presently,
but which it is enough here to allude to. For that ardent, sensitive,
reverent regard which the modern time turns on Nature, recent
research may be said to have furnished a rational basis, a sufficient
justification. Not that Science created this mental attitude, this
new-born sentiment; it is due to other, more subtle and hidden causes.
Indeed, it may be that the two great contemporaneous influences, the
increased activity of physical discovery working by scientific analysis,
and the enlarged and heightened admiration of Nature as seen through the
imagination, are but opposite sides of the one great current of modern
thought. Shelley speaks of the “intense and comprehensive imagery which
distinguishes the modern literature of England,” and this, though by no
means a product of physical science, is in keeping with its revelations,
though it goes beyond and supplements them.

_2d._ Again: the greatest of the early poets, as we have seen, were
instinctive lovers of Nature, and faithful delineators of its forms. But
in presence of the unresting scrutiny and careful exactness of Science,
modern poets are stimulated to still closer, more minute observation.
Indeed, there may be danger lest this tendency in Poetry go too far, and
make it too microscopic and forgetful of that higher function which,
while seeing truly, ever spiritualizes what it sees. However this may be,
it is clear that Science by its contagion has stimulated the observing
powers of the modern poet, and made him more than ever a heedful

                “Watcher of those still reports
    Which Nature utters from her rural shrine.”

_3d._ Again: since the progress of modern Science has let in on the
mental vision whole worlds of new facts and new forces,—a height and a
depth, a vastness and minuteness in Nature, as she works all around us,
alike in the smallest pebble on the shore, and “in the loftiest star
of unascended heaven,”—it cannot be but that all this now familiar
knowledge should enter into the sympathetic soul of the poet, and color
his eye as he looks abroad on Nature. When the eye, for instance, from
the southern beach of the Moray Firth passes over to its northern shore,
and rests on the succession of high plateaux and precipiced promontories
which form the opposite coast, and observes how the whole landscape
has been shaped, moulded, and rounded into its present uniformity of
feature by the glaciers that untold ages since descended from Ben Wyvis
and his neighboring altitudes, and wore and ground the masses of old
red sandstone into the outlines of the bluffs he now sees,—who can look
on such a spectacle without having new thoughts awakened within him,
of Nature working with her primeval wedges of frost, ice, and flood,
to carve the solid rock into the lineaments before him, and of the
still higher power behind Nature that directs and controls all these
her movements to ulterior and sublimer ends! When, in addition to these
thoughts, the gazer calls to mind that these are the native headlands
which first arrested the meditative eye of the great northern mason, more
than any other, geologist and poet in one, and fed the fire of his young
enthusiasm, does not the geologic charactery that is scrawled upon these
rocks receive a strange enhancement of human interest?

Again: the huge gray bowlders strewn here and there on the top of those
promontories, and all about the dusky moors, when we learn that they have
been floated to their present stations from leagues away by long vanished
glaciers, no doubt their gaunt shapes become wonderfully suggestive. And
yet, perhaps, nothing that geology can teach regarding them will ever
invest them with a more imaginative aspect than that which they wore to
the poet’s eye, when, caring little enough for scientific theories, it
shaped them into this human phantasy—

    “As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
    Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
    Wonder to all who do the same espy
    By what means it hath hither come, and whence;
    So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
    Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
    Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.”

But no doubt the truths of geology, if known to a poet, will in some
measure enter into his description of scenery. For as the geological
structure of a country powerfully moulds and determines its features,
the knowledge of this, if possessed, must enter into the poet’s eye as
it ranges over the landscape. How powerfully geological causes are to
modify scenery is well set forth in a passage of the same Preface of Mr.
Ruskin’s from which I have already quoted.

The new light which the discovery of these fads throws upon scenery
cannot now well be neglected by the poet. And it is impossible to divine
how many new facts and farther vistas into the recesses of Nature future
discovery may open up, which, when they have passed into the educated
mind, poets must in their own way find expression for. But one thing
is clear, the poet, however he may avail himself of scientific truth,
must not himself merge the Poet in the investigator or analyst. That
function he must leave to the physicist, and be content to employ the
material with which the physicist furnishes him to enrich and enlarge
his vision of beauty. Moreover, the scientific facts he uses must not
be those which are still abstruse and difficult, but those with which
educated men at least have already become familiar. But, above all, the
poet, if he is not to abdicate his function, must retain that freshness
of eye, that childlikeness of heart, which looks forth with ever-young
delight and wonder and awe on the great spectacle which Nature spreads
before him. Most men have lost this gift, their spirits being crushed
beneath the dead weight of custom. Our boasted civilization and education
have done their best to destroy it; so that now it has come about that
to the dull mechanic mind this marvelous earth is but a black ball of
mud, painted here and there with some streaks of green and gold. To
the drily scientific mind, which fancies itself educated, it is merely
a huge piece of mechanism, like some great mill or factory, worked by
forces which he proudly tabulates and calls Laws of Nature. But to
the true poet the earth and sky have not yet lost all their original
brightness. His eye still sees them with the dew upon them, in inspired
moments still catches sight of the visionary gleam. His gift it is, his
peculiar function, seeing this himself, to make others see and feel it,
to make his fellow-men sharers in his perceptions and in the joy they
bring. He purges our dulled eyes as with euphrasy and rue, and opens
them to partake of the vision which he himself beholds. For after all
the sciences have said their say, and propounded their explanations of
things, as far as they go, the poet feels that there is in this visible
Universe, and the spectacle it presents, something more than all the
sciences have as yet grasped or ever will grasp—feels that there is in
and through and behind all Nature a mysterious life, which he “cannot
compass, cannot utter,” but which he must still bear witness to. This
great truth which lay at the bottom of the old mythologies, which
gives meaning to many forms of mysticism, but which our dull mechanic
philosophies have long discredited, still haunts the soul of the poet,
and, feeling it profoundly himself, he longs to express and make others
feel it.



CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTICAL SIDE OF NATURE.


_4th._ The mystical feeling which the contemplation of Nature has
awakened in poets of every age, but which our own day has so greatly
expanded, while it is not directly suggested by Science, yet finds
support from its disclosures. That great spectacle which from earliest
ages has thrilled the poet’s soul with rapture and awe we know now to
be produced by recognized laws, to be interpenetrated by numberless
well-ordered forces, which, are indeed but thought localized, reason made
visible. The intuitive wonder which the earliest poet felt is more than
justified by the latest discoveries of Science.

And yet, be it observed, whatever support the truths of Science may give
to the poet’s instinctive perceptions, it is not on the physical causes
and operations revealed by Science that his eye chiefly dwells. He has
an object of contemplation which is distinct from these and peculiar
to himself, and that is the Beauty which he sees in the face of the
Universe. Over and above the physical laws which uphold and carry on this
framework of things, beyond all the uses which this mechanism subserves,
there is this further fact, this additional result, that all these laws
and forces in their combination issue in Beauty. This Beauty, while it is
created by the collocation and harmonious working of the physical laws,
is a thing distinct from them and their operation. It is an aspect of
things with which the physicist as such does not intermeddle, but it is
as real and as powerful over the minds of men as any force which Science
has disclosed. Modern discovery may have enlarged and intensified it, but
has in no way originated it. In this Beauty the poet from the first has
found his favorite field, the main region of his energy. For ages the
vision of this beauty has haunted, riveted, fascinated him. And if he
is no longer as of old its sole guardian, he is still, whether speaking
through verse or prose, its best and truest interpreter. This truth, that
the Beauty of Nature is something in thought distinct, though in fact
inseparable from the machinery of Nature, has been brought out and dwelt
on with remarkable power by Canon Mozley in his most suggestive sermon on
“Nature.” And he further insists with great force on the truth that it is
this spectacle of beauty produced by the useful laws which is the special
province of the poet:—

“He fixes his eye upon the passive spectacle, upon Nature as an
appearance, a sight, a picture. To another he leaves the search and
analysis; he is content to look, and to look only; this, and this alone,
satisfies him; he stands like a watcher or sentinel, gazing on earth,
sea, and sky, upon the vast assembled imagery, upon the rich majestic
representation on the canvas.”[7]

It is then the spectacle of beauty produced by the combination of
physical laws, this beauty, and not the physical laws which produce
it, on which the poet fixes his gaze. In the presence of it the
poet’s first mental attitude is one of pure receptivity. As the clear
windless lake, spread out on a still autumn day, takes into its steady
bosom every feature of the surrounding mountains, every hue of the
overhanging sky, so is his soul spread out to receive into itself the
whole imagery of Nature. When this wise passiveness has been undergone,
what images, sentiments, thoughts the poet will give back depends on
the capaciousness, the depth, the clearness of soul within him. The
highest poetry of Nature is that which receives most inspiration from
the spectacle, which extracts out of it the largest number of great and
true thoughts. And a thought or idea, as Mr. Ruskin has taught us, “is
great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind,
and as it more fully occupies and, in occupying, exercises and exalts the
faculty by which it is received.”

There are no doubt poets who are mainly taken up with the forms and
colors of things, and yet no poet can rest wholly in them, for this,
if for no other reason, that in the power of rendering them his art
necessarily falls so far below that of the painter. Even those poets who
deal most humbly with Nature must, when they endeavor to make us feel its
visible beauty, link the outward forms and colors to some simple thoughts
of animal delight, or of comfort, or of childhood, or of home affection.
This much he must do, if only to make them vivid, to bring them home to
us. But he who does not go beyond this has not attained to those higher
secrets of Nature, which are open to the meditative imagination. When a
reflective man comes on some sudden beauty of scenery in the wilderness
where no man is, how often has the thought arisen that all this beauty
cannot be wasted on vacancy, that though man comes not that way to see
it, there must be other eyes that behold the spectacle,—one Eye at least
by which it is not unseen.

Whether we regard the beauty as something wholly external to us, as lying
outside of us on the face of Nature, or as a creation resulting from the
combination of certain external qualities, and of an intelligent mind
which perceives them, whichever of these views we take, the beauty is
there, no mere dream or phantasy, but something to whose existence the
soul witnesses, as truly as the eye does to the existence of light or
of those motions which perceived are light. What is it, whence comes
it, what means it? It is not something we can reason from as we can
from marks of contrivance and design. It will not lend itself to any
syllogism. But notwithstanding this, or perhaps owing to this, it awakens
deeper thoughts, it carries the mind farther than any mere proofs of
design can do. The beautiful aspect of the outward world, and the delight
which it inspires, are no doubt proofs of a goodness somewhere which
supports these, just as food and air are proofs of it. But they are more:
they have a mystic meaning, they are hints and intimations of something
more than eye, or ear, or mere intellect discover. If the outward world
and the mind of man are so constructed that they fall in with, and answer
to, each other,—if mere physical qualities, such as height, depth,
expansion, silence, solitude, sunshine, shadow, gloom, affect the soul
in certain well-known ways, awakening in us emotions of awe and wonder,
of peace, gladness, sadness, and solemnity,—we naturally ask ourselves,
after being thus moved, why is it we were so affected, what is it in the
outward world which awakens these emotions? It is a natural question for
those who have felt the strange impulses from the changeful countenance
of the world. It was not mere shape or color that so affected them: these
feelings did not come by chance, they were not without meaning; they
point to something outside of themselves, something inherent in the truth
of things. When the spirit within them was so stirred, they felt that
that which so addressed them, though it came through physical things,
was more than physical, was spiritual. For it carried their thoughts and
feelings quite out of the natural and physical appearances, till they
found themselves in commune with something akin to their own spirits,
though higher and vaster. The beauty which came to them through eye, ear,
and imagination, they felt to belong to the same order as that which more
directly addresses their moral heart and conscience. It was the Great
Being behind the veil who comes to us directly through the conscience,
coming more indirectly, but not less really, through the eye and ear. Not
otherwise can we account for the intense love which the sights and sounds
of Nature have awakened in the best and purest of men, and the more so as
they grew in maturity and serenity of soul.

It is a true instinct when men are led to regard the beauty of the world
that comes to them through the eye, and the moral light which shines
from behind upon the soul, as coming from one centre, and leading upward
to the thought of one Being who is above both. In this way all visible
beauty becomes a hint and a foreshadowing of something more than itself.
But if Nature is to be the symbol of something higher than itself, to
convey intimations of Him from whom both Nature and the soul proceed,
man must come to the spectacle with the thought of God already in his
heart. He will not get a religion out of the mere sight of Nature,
neither from the uses it subserves as indicating design, nor from
the beauty it manifests as hinting at character. No doubt beauty is a
half-way element, mediating between the physical laws and the moral
sentiments, partaking more of the latter than of the former, as being
itself a spiritual perception. No doubt it does in some measure act as a
reconciler between those two elements which so often seem to stand out
in contrast irreconcilable. But if it is to do this, if it is really to
lead the soul upward, man must come to the contemplation of it with his
moral convictions clear and firm, and with faith in these as connecting
him directly with God. Neither morality nor religion will he get out
of beauty taken by itself. If out of the splendid vision spread before
him—the sight of earth, sea, and sky, of the clouds, the gleams, the
shadows—man could arrive directly at the knowledge of Him who is behind
them, how is it that in early ages whole nations, with these sights
continually before them, never reached any moral conception of God? how
is it that even in recent times many of the most gifted spirits, who have
been most penetrated by that vision, and have given it most magnificent
expression, have been in revolt against religious faith? It is because
they sought in Nature alone, that which alone she was never intended to
give. It is because the spectacle of the outward world, however splendid,
if we begin with it, and insist on extracting our main light from it, is
powerless to satisfy our human need, to speak any word which fits in to
man’s moral yearning. Nay, Nature taken alone will often appear no benign
mother at all, no dwelling-place of a kindly spirit, but an inexorable
and cruel Sphinx, who rears children and makes them glad a little while,
only that she may the more relentlessly destroy them.

But he who takes the opposite road, who, instead of looking to visible
Nature for his first teaching, begins with the knowledge of himself, of
his need, his guilt, his helplessness, and listens to the voice that
tells of a strength not his own, and a redemption not in him but for
him, he will learn to look on Nature with other and calmer eyes, and to
discern a meaning in it which taken by itself it cannot give. Man may
then find in the beauty which he sees a hint and intimation of a higher
beauty which he does not see—a something revealed to the eye which
corresponds to the religious truth revealed to the heart, harmonizing
with it and confirming it. He can regard the glory of Nature, not only
in itself and for its own sake, but as the foreshadow and prophecy
of a higher glory yet to be. And so the sight of Nature, instead of
intoxicating, maddening, and rousing to rebellion, soothes, elevates,
spiritualizes, chiming in unison with our best thoughts, our purest
aspirations.

Canon Mozley, in his sermon on “Nature” already alluded to, has dwelt
very powerfully on this, as the use which the highest Poetry makes of
Nature, and has shown that it is at once in accordance with the teaching
and practice of Scripture, and true to our human instincts. He shows how
sight, the noblest of our senses here, is made the pattern and type of
the highest attitude of the soul hereafter. For heaven is represented
as “a perfected sight,” and he who attains to it is to be a beholder.
It is not mere self-rapt thought or inward contemplation, but a future
vision of God which is promised. Meanwhile Nature and her works are
employed in Scripture, not only as proofs of goodness in God, but also
as symbols representative of what He has in keeping for them who shall
attain. Out of the storehouse of Nature are taken the materials—the light
the rainbow, the sapphire, and the sea of glass—to set forth, as far as
can be set forth, the things that shall be,—sight, the noblest sense
here, made the type of the highest mental act hereafter; and Nature the
spectacle given to employ sight now, and to adumbrate the things that
shall be in heaven:—this is the high function assigned by Scripture to
sight and to Nature.

When, therefore, in the light of these thoughts we study Nature in this,
her highest poetic aspect, we may well feel that we are engaged in no
trivial employment, but in one befitting an immortal being. Even the most
common acts of minutely observing Nature’s handiwork may in this way
partake of a religious character. How much more when the great spectacle
of Nature lends itself to devout imagination, and becomes as it were the
steps of a stair ascending toward the Eternal!



CHAPTER VII.

PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY.


The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are
boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and
through the beauty inherent in it, we get a glimpse into the connection
of the visible world with the realities of morality and of religion. The
vivid feeling of Beauty suggests, what other avenues of thought more
fully disclose, that the complicated mechanism of Nature which Science
investigates and formulates into physical law is not the whole, that
it is but the case or outer shell of something greater and better than
itself, that through this mechanism and above it, within it, and beyond
it, there lie existences which Science has not yet formulated—probably
never can formulate—a supersensible world, which, to the soul, is more
real and of higher import than any which the senses reveal. It is
apprehended by other faculties than those through which Science works,
yet it is in no way opposed to science, but in perfect harmony with it,
while transcending it. The mechanical explanation of things—of the
Universe—we accept as far as it goes, but we refuse to take it as the
whole account of the matter, for we know, on the testimony of moral and
spiritual powers, that there is more beyond, and that that which is
behind and beyond the mechanism is higher and nobler than the mechanism.
We refuse to regard the Universe as only a machine, and hold by the
intuitions of faith and of Poetry, though the objects which these let in
on us cannot be counted, measured, or weighed, or verified by any of the
tests which some physicists demand as the only gauges of reality. This
ideal but most real region, which the visible world in part hides from
us, in part reveals, is the abode of that supersensible truth to which
conscience witnesses,—the special dwelling-place of the One Supreme Mind.
The mechanical world and the ideal or spiritual are both actual. Neither
is to be denied, and Imagination and Poetry do their best work when they
body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us
through the outer shell of Nature’s mechanism.

But

                      “Descending
    From these imaginative heights,”

we must turn to the humbler task of showing by a few concrete examples
how Imagination has actually worked on the plastic stuff supplied by
Nature. To this the readiest way would be to turn to the works of the
great poets, and see how they, as a matter of fact, have dealt with the
outward world. Before doing so, however, a few words may be given to the
marks which Imagination has impressed on Nature in the prehistoric and
preliterary ages. The record of this process lies imbedded in two fossil
creations, Language and Mythology.

_Language._—In the very childhood of the race, long before regular
poetry or literature were thought of, there was a time when Imagination,
working on the appearances of the visible world, was the great weaver of
human speech, the most powerful agent in forming the marvelous fabric of
language. It has long been well known to all who have given attention
to the subject, that Metaphor has played a large part in the original
formation of language. But how large that part is has only been recently
made evident by the researches of Comparative Philology. Metaphor, as
all know, means “the transferring of a name from the object to which it
properly belongs to other objects which strike the mind as in some way
resembling the first object.” Now this is the great instrument which
works at the production of a large portion of language. And Imagination
is the power which creates metaphor, which sees resemblances between
things, seizes on them, and makes them the occasion of transferring the
name from the well known original object to some other object resembling
it, which still waits for a name. Even in our own day newly-invented
objects are often named by metaphor, but metaphors thus consciously
formed belong to a later age. Long before such metaphors were formed,
Imagination had been silently and unconsciously at work, naming the
whole world of mental and spiritual existences by metaphors taken from
visible and tangible things. It is quite a commonplace that the whole
vocabulary by which we name our souls, our mental states, our emotions,
abstract conceptions, invisible and spiritual realities, is woven in the
earliest ages by the Imagination from the resemblances which it seemed
to perceive between the subtle and still unnamed things of mind, and
objects or aspects of the external world. This is not so easily seen in
the English language, because owing to our having borrowed almost all
our words expressive of mental things from other languages, the marks of
metaphor are to our eyes obliterated. In fact all our words for mental
and spiritual things are like coins which, having passed through many
hands, have had the original image and superscription nearly quite worn
out. None the less these are still to be traced by those who have their
eyes exercised to it by reason of use. But it is manifest in German,
which has spun a large part of its philosophical vocabulary out of native
roots. It may be seen, in some measure, in Latin, but much more in Greek
philosophical language.

This whole subject has been so well handled and so amply illustrated
by Professor Max Müller in the Second Series of his Lectures on “the
Science of Language,” and in Archbishop Trench’s instructive and
delightful volumes on “Words,” that I can but refer to these works and
make here a few excerpts from them as examples of the general principle
of thought to which I have adverted. Locke, as Professor Müller shows,
long ago asserted that in all languages “names which stand for things
which fall not under our senses have had their first rise from sensible
ideas.”

Our word “spirit” comes from the Latin _spiritus_, the breath, and
_spiro_, to breathe; so _animus_, the soul, a seat of the affections, and
_anima_, the living principle, are connected with the Greek ἄνεμος, wind.
Indeed, _anima_ is sometimes used in Latin for a breeze, as readers of
Horace will remember, and all are connected with the Greek verb ἄω, to
blow. πνεῦμα, the Greek word used in Scripture to express spirit and a
spiritual being, originally means wind and breath, from the verb πνέω, to
blow and to breathe. Again, ψυχή, life and soul, is connected with ψύχω,
which in Homer means to breathe, to blow. So that in all these cases we
see that men, when they first became aware of an invisible and spiritual
principle within themselves, named it by an act of imagination from the
most impalpable entity their senses perceived,—the wind, or the breath.
Again, take our word “ideal.” It comes from the Greek ἰδέα, from ἰδεῖν,
to see, originally a word of sight, expressing the look or appearance
of a thing, which Plato in time employed to express the most spiritual
entities, the supersensible pattern of all created things. Again, our
words “imagination” and “imaginative,” how have they been formed? The
Latin word _imaginatio_ occurs but rarely; more frequently the verb
_imaginor_, to picture to one’s self; more frequent still is _imago_,
as if _imitago_, from _imitor_, to imitate. This last is connected with
the Greek verb μιμέομαι, meaning also to imitate; and the original of
these, and all the cognate words, both Latin and Greek, is the Sanscrit
root _mâ_, to measure. So from this very palpable process of measuring
the land, there have been spun all the subtle and delicate words that
express the working of imagination. So the mental processes expressed by
“apprehend,” “comprehend,” and “conceive,” are all derived from bodily
processes, and mean respectively to grasp at a thing with the hand,
to grasp a thing together, to take and hold together. Again, the word
“perceive,” from the Latin _percipere_, was in the language of husbandry
used for the farmer gathering in the fruits of his fields and storing
them in his garner. Was then the mind conceived of as a husbandman who
gathers in the notices of sense from the outer world, and stores them in
an invisible garner? To “inculcate:” here is another mental word borrowed
from husbandry. It means to tread or stamp firmly in with the heel, and
was used of the farmer, who, with his foot or some instrument, carefully
pressed home into the earth the seed which he had sown. We see how well
the metaphor can be transferred to the process of careful teaching—to the
clergyman, for instance, who inculcates religious truth. These are but a
few obvious and well-known samples of a process which has gone on in all
languages, and has furnished forth our whole stock of names for mental
operations and spiritual truths. And Imagination has been the power which
has presided over the process, the interpreter mediating between two
worlds, and naming the unseen realities of the inner world by analogies
which she perceives in them to the sensible objects of the outer.
Disciples of the Hume philosophy will see in these facts of language a
confirmation of their master’s dictum that all ideas and thoughts are but
weak and faded copies of the more vivid impressions first stamped on the
senses. But those who have been learners in another school, to whom the
world of thought has more power and reality than the world of sense, they
will read in these facts a different lesson, that He has made all things
double, the one over against the other, and that the thought by which
both are pervaded is one.

Truly then has it been said, “Language is fossil poetry.” And any one
who will set himself to spell out those fossils, and the meanings they
contain, will find a wonderful record of the way in which the mind of
man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into
layers of thought as varied as any which the geologist deciphers, filled
with more subtle and marvelous formations than any animal or vegetable
fossils. For full exposition and illustration of the mental processes by
which so large a portion of language has been created, the reader should
turn to Professor Müller’s volume, to which I have already referred.

Wholly different from this primeval process of naming things by
unconscious metaphors is the modern metaphor, as we find it in the poets.
When Shelley speaks of the moon as

    “That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,
      Whom mortals call the Moon,”

he is using a metaphor, and a very fine one, but he does so with perfect
consciousness that it is a metaphor, and there is not the least danger of
the poet, or any one else, confounding the moon with any maiden, earthly
or heavenly.

Again, when Mrs. Hemans addresses the moaning night-winds as

    “Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!
      At whose tones my heart within me burns,”

there is no likelihood of any confusion between the winds and mortal
singers, no chance of the metaphor ever growing into mythology.

Once more: to return to Shelley—

    “Winter came; the wind was his whip
    One choppy finger was on his lip:
    He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
    And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,
    His breath was a chain that without a sound
    The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
    He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
    By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”

Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid
that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and
reflective character of the age in which it was created.

_Mythology._—The other great primitive creation wrought by the action
of the human imagination, in its attempts to name and explain the
appearances of visible Nature, was ancient mythology. That huge
unintelligible mass of fable which we find imbedded in the poets of
Greece and Rome has long been a riddle which no learning could read.
But just as modern telescopes have resolved the dim masses of nebulæ
into distinct stars, so the resources of that modern scholarship called
Comparative Philology seems at last on the way to let in light on the
hitherto impenetrable secret of the origin of religious myths. It has
gradually been made probable that the Olympian gods, whatever capricious
shapes they afterward assumed, were in their origin but the first feeble
efforts of the human mind to name the unnamable, to give local habitation
and expression to the incomprehensible Being who haunted men’s inmost
thoughts, but was above their highest powers of conception. In making
this attempt, the religious instinct of our Aryan forefathers wrought,
not through the abstracting or philosophical faculty, but through the
thought-embodying, shaping power of imagination, by which in later ages
all true poets have worked, that in the dim foretime fashioned the whole
fabric of mythology. It was the same faculty of giving a visible shape to
thought.

As soon as man wakes up to think of himself, what he is, how he is
here, he feels that he depends not on himself, but on something other
than and independent of himself; that there is One on whom “our dark
foundations rest.” “It is He that made us, and not we ourselves;” this
is the instinctive cry of the human heart when it begins to reflect
that it is here, and to ask how it came here. This consciousness of
God, which is the dawn of all religion, is reached not as a conclusion
reasoned out from premises, not as a law generalized from a multitude
of facts, but as a first instinct of intelligence, a perception flashed
on the soul as directly as impressions are borne in upon the sense,
a faith which may be afterward fortified by arguments, but is itself
anterior to all argument.[8] When this thought awoke, when men felt the
reality of “that secret thing which they see by reverence alone,” how
were they to conceive of it, how name it? for a name was necessary to
retain any thought as a permanent possession, much more this thought,
the highest of all thoughts. The story of the well-known Dyaus, or the
formation of this name for the Supreme God, has been told so often of
late by Professor M. Müller, in his various works, that I should not have
ventured to repeat it after him once again, had it not been necessary for
the illustration of my present subject. It has been proved that in almost
all the Aryan languages—Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic—the
name for the Highest, the Supreme Being, has sprung from one root. “The
Highest God received the same name in the ancient mythology of India,
Greece, Italy, Germany, and retained the name whether worshiped on the
Himalayan mountains or among the oaks of Dodona, or in the Capitol of
Rome, or in the forests of Germany.” The Sanscrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus,
the Latin Jupiter (Jovis), the Teutonic Tiu (whence our Tuesday), are
originally one word, and spring from one root. That root is found in
Sanscrit, in the old word _dyu_, which originally meant sky and day.
Dyaus therefore meant the bright heavenly Deity. When men began to think
of the incomprehensible Being who is above all things, and comprehends
all things, and when they sought to name Him, the name must be taken from
some known visible thing, and what so natural as that the bright, blue,
boundless, all-embracing, sublime, and infinite vault, which contains man
and all that man knows, should be made the type and symbol to furnish
that name?

When the old Aryan people, before their dispersion, thus named their
thought about the Supreme as the Shining One, Professor Müller does not
think that it was any mere personification of the sky, or Nature-worship,
or idolatry that led to their so naming Him. Rather he thinks that that
old race were still believers in one God, whom they worshiped under
the name Heaven-Father. This inquiry, however, lies beyond our present
purpose. What it more concerns us now to note is that it was a high
effort of thought to make the blue, calm, all-embracing sky the type
and symbol of the Invisible One, and that the power which wrought out
that first name for the Supreme was Imagination working unconsciously,
we might almost say involuntarily—the same power which in its later
conscious action, under control of the poet’s will, has found a vent for
itself in Poetry.

In the same way Comparative Philology accounts for all the stories about
the beautiful youth Phœbus Apollo, Athene, and Aphrodite.

“I look,” Professor Müller says, “on the sunrise and sunset, on the daily
return of night and day, on the battle between light and darkness, on
the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every
month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principal subject of
early mythology. I consider that the very idea of Divine powers sprang
from the wonderment with which the forefathers of the Aryan family
stared at the bright (_deva_) powers that came and went no one knew
whence or whither, that never failed, never faded, never died, and were
called immortal, _i. e._, unfading, as compared with the feeble and
decaying race of man. I consider the regular recurrence of phenomena
an almost indispensable condition of their being raised, through the
charms of mythological phraseology, to the rank of immortals: and I give
a proportionably small place to the meteorological phenomena, such as
clouds, thunder, and lightning, which, although causing for a time a
violent commotion in nature and in the heart of man, would not be ranked
together with the immortal bright beings, but would rather be classed
together as their subjects or as their enemies.”

In this eloquent passage Professor Müller expresses his well-known “Solar
Theory” of mythology. At the close of the passage he alludes to a counter
theory which has been called the Meteoric, which makes mythology find
its chief field, not in the calm and uniform phenomena of the sun’s
coming and going, and of day and night, but in the occasional and violent
convulsions of storm, thunder, and earthquake. Not what is fixed and
uniform, but what is sudden and startling, most arrests the imagination,
according to this latter theory. But it does not concern us here to
discuss the claims of these rival views, but rather to remark that in
both alike it is the imagination in man to which the aspects of heaven,
whether uniform or occasional, calm or turbulent, make their appeal,
and that when, according to that tendency of language noted by Professor
Müller, words assume an independent power and dominate over the mind
instead of being dominated by it, it is Imagination which throws itself
into the tendency, and takes occasion from it to weave its many-tissued,
many-colored web of mythologic fable.

But however adequate such theories may be to people the whole Pantheon
of Olympus, they seem quite out of place when brought to account for the
inhabitants of this lower world. Nothing can seem less likely than that
the conceptions of Achilles and Hector can have arisen from myths of the
dawn. Characters that stand out so firmly drawn, so human and so natural,
in the gallery of human portraiture, can hardly have been shaped out
of such skyey materials. One could as readily believe that Othello or
Macbeth had such an origin.

It is easy to laugh at those early fancies which men dreamed in the
childhood of the world, and took for truth; and to congratulate ourselves
that we, with our modern lights of Science, have long outgrown those
mythic fables; but with the exacter knowledge of the world’s mechanism
which Science has taught us, is there not something we have lost?
Whither has gone that fine wonder with which the first men gazed on
the earth and the heavens from the plains of Iran and Chaldea? It lies
buried beneath the mass of second-hand thought and information which
Science has heaped upon us. Would it not be well if we could win back
the truth, of which a dull mechanical or merely logical way of thinking
has long robbed us, that the outward world, with all its movements, is
not a mere dead machine, going by ropes and pulleys and cog-wheels, but
an organism full of a mysterious life, which defies our most subtle
analysis, and escapes us when placed in the crucible? This feeling, that
things are alive and not dead, rests at the bottom of all mythology, the
one root of truth underlying the huge mass of fable. How to regain this
perception of something divine in Nature, more than eye and ear discover,
and to do this in harmony with all the facts and laws which Science has
ascertained, this is a problem reserved for thoughtful men in the future
time.



CHAPTER VIII.

SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE.


Those who have not given attention to the subject are apt to imagine that
the chief creators of mythological fables were the poets, and especially
Homer. They suppose that the early poets, by sheer power of imagination,
invented those stories to adorn their poems, and so gave them currency
among the people. It was not so. Even Homer, the earliest poet whom we
know, belonged to an era when the myth-creating instinct was past its
prime, and already on the wane. The fables of the gods, their loves and
their quarrels, as these appear in his poems, there is no reason to
suppose that he created them or imagined them for the first time. It
would rather seem that they had been long current in popular belief,
and that he only used and gave expression to stories which he found
ready-made. Here and there in Homer you may still detect some traces
of the mythologizing tendency still lingering, and catch the primitive
physical meaning of the myth shining through the anthropomorphic covering
which it afterward assumed. Such glimpses we get in Zeus, when he
gathers the clouds in the sky, when he rouses himself to snow upon men
and manifests his feathery shafts, when he rains continuously, when he
bows the heavens and comes down upon the peaks of Ida. Or again, when
Poseidon, the earth-encompassing, the earth-shaker, yokes his car at
Hegeæ and drives full upon the Trojan strand: I take the passage from Mr.
Cordery’s translation of the Iliad:—

                                  “He entered in,
    And there beneath his chariot drew to yoke
    Fast-flying horses, maned with flowing gold,
    Hooved with bright brass; and girt himself in gold,
    Took golden goad, and sprang upon the car;
    So forth upon the billows, round whose path
    Huge monsters gamboled, gathering from the depth
    Afar, anear, and joyous knew their lord;
    Ocean for gladness stood in sunder cloven,
    Whilst lightly flew the steeds, nor ’neath the car
    The burnished axle moistened with the brine:—
    Thus tow’rd the fleet his coursers bore the god.”

Here we have, half-physical, half-mythological, like Milton’s
half-created lion, the fore part perfect, the hinder part still clay,
a well-known natural appearance. After the storm-winds are laid, but
while the sea still feels their power, it is thus that the high-crested
breakers may be seen racing shorewards with their white manes backward
streaming, and glorified with rainbow hues from a bright dawn or a
splendid sunset poured upon them from the land.

But for the most part, even Homer, early poet though he was, has quite
forgotten that original aspect of Nature out of which each god was
shaped, and has invested them with entirely human attributes, even with
human follies and vices, which have no connection at all with the primary
fact, but are the wildest freaks of extravagant fancy. If then even Homer
has so much forgotten the physical origin of his mythic gods, how must
it be with the tragic poets! Æschylus and Sophocles we see have entirely
put aside the immoral fables about them, and are anxious to find the
truth which lies at the root of the popular belief, and to moralize the
whole conception of the gods. When we come down to the Latin poets, we do
not find even this effort; but the gods they have borrowed from Greece
are used as mere poetic machines, with as little of either physical or
moral meaning as a modern romance-writer might use fairies, gnomes, or
hobgoblins.

Although in the more imaginative of modern poets, modes of conceiving
Nature, and expressions every here and there crop out, which in an
earlier age would certainly have flowered into mythology, it is
nevertheless true that, ever since the literary age set in, poets in
general have viewed Nature with a more familiar eye, and described it in
language which ordinary speech would not disown. I shall now endeavor to
classify the several ways in which Nature is dealt with by the poets,
the several aspects of it which enter most prominently into Poetry. It
will be enough for my present purpose merely to generalize, under a few
heads, the most obvious of these forms, without attempting to analyze
them or to account for them.


I.

The first form I shall notice is the expression of that simple,
spontaneous, unreflecting pleasure which all unsophisticated beings feel
in free open-air life. We all know how children feel when they are let
loose to wander at will in green fields, or by a burn-side, or under
the budding woods when the primroses and anemones first appear. The
full-grown man, too, the man of business or letters, knows how—when his
nerves have been over-strung and his heart fretted by worldly things—a
day abroad under a blue sky, with a soft southwest blowing, restores and
harmonizes him. Old persons, we may have observed, who have seen and
suffered much, from whom the world and its interests are receding: what a
sense of peace and refreshment comes over them as they gaze in quiet over
a distant landscape with the sunlight upon it!

This delight, which children, busy men, and weary age alike find in
out-of-door life, may be said to be merely physical, a thing of the
nerves and animal spirits. It is so, no doubt, but it is something
more. Along with pleasure to the senses, there enters in something
more ethereal, not the less real because it may be undefinable. This
fresh child-like delight in Nature has found expression abundantly in
the poets, especially in those of the early time. Chaucer, before all
others, is full of it. As one sample out of many, take this. In the
Prologue to “The Legend of Good Women,” he tells that he has such love to
the daisy that—

            “When comen is the May,
    Then in my bed there daweth me no day
    That I n’am up and walking in the mead,
    To see this flower against the sunné spread,
    When it upriseth early in the morrow;
    That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow;
    So glad am I when that I have presénce
    Of it, to doen it all reverence,
    As she that is of all flow’rs the flow’r.”

Then he goes on to describe himself kneeling down on the sod to greet the
daisy when it first opens:—

    “And down on knees anon right I me set,
    And as I could this freshé flow’r I grette,
    Kneeling always till it unclosed was
    Upon the small, and soft, and sweeté gras.”

So we see Chaucer has been beforehand with Burns, not to say Wordsworth,
in tender affection for the daisy.

The same transparent expression of delight in the open-air world comes
in unexpectedly in some of the old ballads, which are concerned with far
other matters. Thus:—

    ...

    “When leaves be large and long
    It’s pleasant walking in good greenwood
      To hear the small birds’ song.
    The woodweel sang and would not cease,
      Sitting upon the spray,
    So loud he wakened Robin Hood,
      In greenwood where he lay.”

Suchlike utterances of ballad-writers and early poets might be
multiplied without number. It is a penalty we have to pay for our late
and over-stimulated civilization that such direct and unreflecting
expressions of gladness in the face of Nature seem hardly any
longer possible for a poet. If he will be listened to by our jaded,
sophisticated ears, it is not enough for him to utter once again the
spontaneous gladness that human hearts feel, and always will feel, in the
pleasant air and the sunshine; he must say something about it which shall
be novel, and out of the way, something subtle or analytic, or strongly
stimulative. And yet it cannot but be that a poet who has a heart keenly
sensitive to the common sights of earth and sky, and who describes these
with the direct freshness which feeling heart and clear eye always give,
may still do much to win back men from over-subtilizing, and to make them
feel as if they have never felt before—

    “The simple, the sincere delight,
    The habitual scene of hill and dale,
    The rural herds, the vernal gale,
    The tangled vetches’ purple bloom,
    The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.”


II.

The second method I shall mention is that of using Nature as a background
or setting to human action or emotion,—just as we see Raphael and other
old masters, in their pictures of a Holy Family, bring in behind the
human groups a far-off mountain line, with a piece of blue sky or some
streaks of sunset above it.

This is the way in which Nature is very frequently used by Homer in the
Iliad, and, especially, in the Odyssey. It is as a frame or setting to
his pictures of human action and character. And closely allied to this
is the way of illustrating the actions, the feelings, sometimes the
sufferings, of men, by striking similes taken from the most obvious
appearances of the outward world, or from the doing of wild creatures in
Nature. This is a use of Nature in which the Iliad of Homer especially
abounds, although all poets down to our own day have freely employed it.
In the Iliad there is little or no description of the scenes in which the
battles are fought. The features are hinted at by single epithets, such
as many-fountained Ida, windy Ilion, deep-whirlpooled Scamander, and the
presence of Nature you are made to feel by images fetched straight from
every element,—from the clouds, the mountain-top, the woody crag, the
forest, the sea darkening under the western breeze, the midnight sky with
the moon and the stars shining in its depths.

But there is in the Iliad no dwelling on the features of the scenes
through which the heroes pass, such as you find in the Odyssey and in
the Æneid. In these last, more than in the Iliad, Nature is used as the
regular framework in which human actions are set. I cannot now stay to
quote passages. We shall in the sequel see how large a place is filled,
how much of Nature is let in upon the reader by Homer in his similes,
which are almost all taken from common occurrences in Nature or from the
working of man with Nature. Sometimes, however, we are made to feel the
presence of Nature by other methods than that of simile. In the thick of
the great battle in the 11th Book of the Iliad, just before Agamemnon
breaks forth in his splendid charge, how the mind is relieved by this
glance aside from the heat and hurry of the battle to the cool and quiet
of this woodland scene:—

    “All through the dawn, and as the day grew on
    From either side the shafts were showered amain,
    And fast the people fell. But at the hour
    When the lone woodman in the mountain glens
    Prepares his noonday meal, for that his arms
    Are weary with long labor, and his heart
    Had had its fill of felling the tall treen,
    And craving for sweet food comes over him;
    Just at that hour the Danai by sheer might
    Broke through their foemen’s ranks, each shouting loud
    To cheer his comrade on. First from the van
    Forth-leaping, Agamemnon slew a chief,
    Bienor,”

and then he presses on through the Trojan host, to slay, and slay, and
slay.


III.

Akin to this, and yet distinct from it, is the way of regarding Nature
through the light of the human and especially the historic events which
it has witnessed, and with which some particular spots have become
indelibly associated. This, which I may call the historic coloring of
Nature, has been, of course, the slow accretion of the ages, and only in
quite modern times is it a prominent feature in the poets. The poets of
Greece and Rome, proud as they were of the deeds of their countrymen, do
not seem to have visited their great battle-fields nor to have hung on
the scenery that surrounded them with that romantic interest which modern
poets do. Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, names of glory as they were, and
often on their lips, became to the Greek imagination names for deeds,
abstractions of national achievement, rather than actual localities to
be visited and gazed on for their own sakes and for the memories they
enshrined. It is an English, not a Greek, poet who seizes the great
features of the immortal plain, and sings—

    “The mountains look on Marathon,
    And Marathon looks on the sea.”

The same, too, who, alluding to the great sea-fight, gives the scenery
also:—

    “A king sat on the rocky brow
    That looks o’er sea-born Salamis,
    And ships in thousands lay below,
    And men in nations all were his.
    He counted them at break of day,
    And when the sun set where were they?”

Perhaps of all modern poets, Walter Scott is the one who has looked
on the earth most habitually as seen through the coloring with which
historic events and great historic names have invested it. It is not
only that he has in his romantic epics described the actual features of
the fields of Flodden and of Bannockburn with a minuteness foreign to
the genius of the ancients. He has done this. But, besides, wherever
he set his foot in his native land—not in a battle-field alone, but by
ruined keep or solitary moor, or rocky sea-shore or western island—there
rose before his eye the human forms either of the heroic past or of
the lowlier peasantry, and if no actual record hung among them, his
imagination supplied the want, and peopled the places with characters
appropriate, which shall remain interwoven with the very features of the
scenes while the name of Scotland lasts.

    “For thou upon a hundred streams,
      By tales of love and sorrow.
    Of faithful love, undaunted truth,
      Hast shed the power of Yarrow.”

In some men, not wanting in imagination, the only aspect in which scenery
interests them is when it is linked to history. This is conspicuously
seen in Lord Macaulay. Of him his biographer writes:—“The leading
features of a tract of country impressed themselves rapidly and indelibly
on his observation; all its associations and traditions swept at once
across his memory; and every line of good poetry which its fame or its
beauty had inspired rose almost involuntarily to his lips. But compared
with the wealth of phrase on which he could draw at will when engaged on
the description of human passions, catastrophes, and intrigues, his stock
of epithets applicable to mountains, seas, and clouds was singularly
scanty, and he had no ambition to enlarge it. When he had recorded the
fact, that the leaves were green, the sky blue, and the plain rich, and
the hills clothed with wood, he had said all he had to say, and there was
an end of it.”—That is, Macaulay’s imagination was confined to human and
historic things, and was irresponsive to the direct touch of Nature.

But it is not only by such localized history or romance as Scott has
given, that this human coloring passes into the impassive earth. There is
another more subtle way in which it works, and it is this:—Wherever men
have been upon the earth, even when they have done no memorable deeds,
and left no history behind them, they have lived and they have died,
they have joyed and they have sorrowed; and the sense that men have been
there and disappeared leaves a pathos on the face of many a now unpeopled
solitude.

Those will know what I mean who ever have wandered alone through moors
or glens in the Highlands, where once the old clansmen had their homes,
but in whence they have long departed. Have they not felt, as they
gazed on these wildernesses, where perhaps not even a weathered gable
now tells of man, that the outlines of Nature’s lineaments were touched
with pensiveness indescribable by the atmosphere of foregone humanities
that overspread them? Such are the feelings that are awakened as, far up
in the lap of the highest Bens, you come on the green spots where the
former Celtic people had their summer shielings. In Wordsworth’s “Tour in
Scotland”[9] it is noticed feelingly, as we might expect:—

“At the top of a mountain encircled by higher mountains at a distance,
we were passing without notice a heap of scattered stones, round which
was a belt of green grass—green, and as it seemed rich—where all else was
either poor heather or coarse grass, or unprofitable rushes and spongy
moss. The Highlander made a pause, saying, ‘This place is much changed
since I was here twenty years ago.’ He told us that the heap of stones
had been a hut, where a family was then living, who had their winter
habitation in the valley, and brought their goats thither in the summer
to feed on the mountains, and that they were used to gather them together
at night and morning to be milked close to the door, which was the reason
why the grass was yet so green near the stones. It was affecting in that
solitude to meet with this memorial of manners passed away. We looked
about for some other traces of humanity, but nothing else could we find
in that place.”

Again: “We came to several deserted mountain huts or shiels, and rested
for some time beside one of them, upon a hillock of its green plot of
monumental herbage. The spot of ground where we sat was even beautiful,
the grass being uncommonly verdant, and of a remarkably soft and silky
texture.” The poet, his sister tells, then felt how fitting a subject for
poetry there was in those affecting “relics of human society found in
that grand and solitary region.”


IV.

Another way in which poets and others deal with Nature is when the heart,
under the stress of some strong emotion, colors all Nature with its own
hues, sees all things in sympathy with its own mood, making

    “All melodies an echo of that voice,
    All colors a suffusion from that light.”

This feeling has been expressed in a very natural way by Sir Walter
Scott:—

      “Who says, that when the Poet dies
    Mute Nature mourns her worshiper,
      And celebrates his obsequies;
    Who says, tall cliff and cavern lone
    For the departed Bard make moan;
    That mountains weep in crystal rill;
    That flowers in tears of balm distill;
    Through his loved groves that breezes sigh,
    And oaks in deeper groans reply;
    And rivers teach their rushing wave
    To murmur dirges round his grave.”

This view of Nature has been philosophically condensed into a single
stanza of Coleridge’s ode on Dejection. He says, that in looking at the
outward world

                “We receive but what we give,
    And in our life alone doth Nature live;
    Ours is the wedding garment, ours the shroud.”

And then he goes on to say that if in Nature we would see

                “Aught of higher worth
      From the soul itself must issue forth
    A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist
      Enveloping the Earth.
    And from the soul itself must there be sent
      A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
    Of all sweet sounds the life and element.”

Now the thought here expressed, false if taken as an adequate explanation
of our whole attitude towards Nature, is eminently true of certain moods
of mind when we are under strong excitement. It is not true that Nature
is a blank or an unintelligible scroll, with no meaning of its own but
that which we put into it from the light of our own transient feelings.
But it is most true that we are often so absorbed in our own inward moods
that we cannot for the time see anything in the outward world but that
which our eye, colored by the emotion, sends into it.

On this subject Mr. Ruskin discourses eloquently and subtly in a chapter
in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” to which I would refer
those interested in these matters. He calls the tendency to make Nature
sympathize with our own present feelings “The Pathetic Fallacy.” His
view of the matter is this: “that the temperament which is subject to
the Pathetic Fallacy is that of a mind and body overborne by feeling,
and too weak (for the time) to deal fully and truthfully with what is
before them or upon them.” He points out that “this state is more or
less noble according to the force and elevation of the emotion which has
caused it; but at its best, if the poet is so overpowered as to color his
descriptions by it, then it is morbid and a sign of weakness. For the
emotions have vanquished the intellect.” It is, he says, “a higher order
of mind, in which the intellect rises and asserts itself along with the
utmost tension of passion, and when the whole man can stand in an iron
glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating;
even if he melts, losing none of his weight.” Mr. Ruskin further says
(p. 164), “There are four classes of men—the men who feel nothing, and
therefore see truly. [He might rather have said, and therefore see
nothing.] The men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly
(second order of poets). The men who feel strongly, think strongly,
and see truly (first order of poets). And the men who, strong as human
creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they,
and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above
them.” This last he calls “the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.”

It will be conceded to Mr. Ruskin that it is not the highest order of
poet who, as he looks out on Nature, is so overmastered by his emotions
as to be continually coloring it with his own mental hues. It is higher
to feel intensely and still think truly, than merely to feel intensely
without true thought. But Mr. Ruskin would allow that for the poet,
whether dramatic, epic, or other, to represent his characters as coloring
the world with their own excited feelings, is neither falsity nor
weakness, but is merely keeping true to a fact of human nature. Numerous
instances of this will occur to every one. Take one from Shakespeare’s
delineations of character. Ariel, breaking through the elements and
powers of Nature, quickens the remorse of Alonso, king of Naples, for a
crime committed twelve years before, till the sounds of Nature become the
voice of conscience—

    “Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
    The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
    That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
    The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass,
    Therefore my son i’ the ooze is bedded, and
    I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded,
    And with him there lie mudded.”


V.

Connected with this last mode of treating Nature, but connected in the
way of contrast, is what I may call the Inhuman and Infinite side of
Nature—that side which yields no response to man’s yearnings, and refuses
to make itself plastic under even the strongest power of emotion. For as
I have elsewhere said,[10] outside of and beyond man, aloof from his warm
hopes and fears, his joy and sorrow, his strivings and aspirations, there
lies the vast immensity of Nature’s forces, which pays him no homage and
yields him no sympathy. This aspect of Nature may be seen even in the
tamest landscape, if we look to the clouds or the stars above us, or to
the ocean-waves that roar around our shores—

    “Those clouds that far above us float and pause,
    Whose pathless march no mortal may control,
    Those ocean-waves that, wheresoe’er they roll,
    Yield homage only to eternal laws.”

But nowhere is it so borne in upon man as in the wilderness where no man
is, in the presence of the great mountains which seem so impassive and
unchangeable. Their strength and permanence so contrast with man, of few
years and full of trouble—they are altogether heedless of his feelings
or his destiny. He may smile or weep, he may live or die; they care not.
They are the same in all their ongoings, come what may to him. They
respond to the sunrises and the sunsets, but not to his emotions. All the
same they fulfill their mighty functions, careless though no human eye
should ever look on them. Man’s heart may be full of gladness, yet Nature
frowns; he goes forth from the death-chamber, and Nature affronts him
with sunshine and the song of birds—

    “Nature, an infinite, unfeeling power
    From some great centre moving evermore,
    Keepeth no festal-day when man is born,
    And hath no tears for his mortality.”

It seems as though she marched on, having a purpose of her own
inaccessible to man; she keeps her own secret, and drops no hint to him.
This side of things, whether philosophically or imaginatively regarded,
seems to justify the saying that “the visible world still remains without
its divine interpretation.” And though inexplicable, perhaps for its
very inexplicability, this mysterious silence, this inexorable deafness,
this inhuman indifference of Nature, has oppressed the imagination of
some of the greatest poets with a vague but sublime awe. The sense of it
lay heavy on Lucretius and Shelley, sometimes on Wordsworth, and drew
out of their souls some of the profoundest music. At the present time,
perhaps from the increased scientific knowledge of Nature’s processes,
this contrast between the warm and tender human heart, and the cold and
impassive, almost relentless, elements, more than ever before dominates
the imaginations of men.


VI.

A sixth mode of poetically treating Nature is that which we meet with
in purely descriptive poetry. In Hesiod, in Theocritus, in the Georgics
of Virgil, among the ancients, we have examples of pure description
interwoven in didactic and idyllic poetry; but it is in modern times
that this kind of poetry has chiefly asserted itself. The most striking
example of it is Thomson’s “Seasons.” There we find that man is quite
subordinate, and only comes in to set off Nature and its appearances,
which form the main object of the poem. As it may seem to be one of the
simplest ways of treating Nature, merely to describe it,—to picture what
the eye sees and the ear hears,—faithfully to reproduce the forms and
colors of things, the movements and the sounds which pervade them—perhaps
some may think it should have been the earliest method. But as a fact,
this kind of poetry, which seems so simple, is the product only of a
late age. Early poets hardly ever handle Nature except to interweave it
with human action and emotion, and as set-off against the life of man.
To regard it by itself, and as existing apart from man, is the mental
attitude of a late and cultivated time, even though the descriptions may
seem to be plain and unadorned.

Since writing these sentences, I have read in Mr. Stopford Brooke’s
admirable “English Literature Primer” a passage in which he attributes
the earliest efforts at poetry of natural description to Scotch poets,
and among these especially to Gawain Douglas, early in the sixteenth
century; and then he, in another place, points out how, when this kind of
poetry came prominently forward in more modern times, it was a Scottish
poet who led the way in it. This is what he says:—

“Natural scenery had been hitherto only used as a background to the
picture of human life. It now (that is, in the first thirty years of the
eighteenth century) began to take a much larger place in poetry, and,
after a time, grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from man.
The best natural description we have before the time of Pope is that of
two Puritans, Marvell and Milton. But the first poem devoted to natural
description appeared while Pope was yet alive, in the very midst of a
vigorous town poetry. It was the “Seasons,” 1726-30; and it is curious,
remembering what I have said about the peculiar turn of the Scotch for
natural description, that it was the work of James Thomson, a Scotchman.
He described the scenery and country-life of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and
Winter. He wrote with his eye upon their scenery, and, even when he wrote
of it in his room, it was with “a recollected love.” The descriptions
were too much like catalogues, the very fault of the previous Scotch
poets; and his style was always heavy, and often cold, but he was the
first poet who led the English people into that new world of nature in
poetry, which has moved and enchanted us in the works of Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, but which was entirely impossible for Pope
to understand. The impulse Thomson gave was soon followed.”

In our own day such poetic descriptions of Nature have burst the bonds
of metre altogether, and filled many a splendid page of poetic or
imaginative prose. Many instances of this will occur to every one.
Preëminent among these are Mr. Ruskin’s elaborate word-pictures of
natural scenery.

But of all poetic description of Nature, it may be said that if it is to
reach any high level it cannot proceed calmly and unexcitedly after the
manner of an inventory. No eye can see deeply into the meaning of Nature
unless it has also looked as deeply into the recesses of the human heart,
and felt the full gravity of man’s life and destiny. It is only when seen
over against these that Nature renders back her profounder tones.


VII.

There is another way in which the poet deals with the external
world,—when he enters into the life and the movement of Nature by a kind
of imaginative sympathy, and brings it home to us by one stroke, flashing
upon our hearts by one touch, one inspired line, a sense of the inner
life of things, and a conviction that he has been allowed for a moment to
penetrate into their secret. This, which has been called, in a special
way, the interpretative power of Poetry, is that in which it reaches its
highest function, and exercises one of its finest offices of mediation
between the soul of man and Nature.

No one, as far as I know, has seen this aspect of Poetry more truly, or
expressed it so felicitously, as my friend Mr. Matthew Arnold. If he has
not been the first to notice it, he has certainly dwelt on it with more
emphasis than any previous writer, as far as I know. For his views on
this subject I would refer to his delightful Essay on Maurice de Guérin,
in his volume entitled “Essays on Criticism.”

As it is well to give a good thought in its best possible form, Mr.
Arnold will, I know, forgive me if I quote at length his own words. He
says:—

“The grand power of Poetry is its interpretative power, by which I mean,
not the power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the
mystery of the Universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to
awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of
our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us as to objects
without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature
of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but
to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them; and this feeling
calms and satisfies us as no other can.... Poetry indeed interprets in
another way besides this; but one of its two ways of interpreting is by
awakening this sense in us. The interpretations of Science do not give us
this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of Poetry give it;
they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man.”

Again Mr. Arnold says:—

“Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets, by expressing with
magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and
it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and
laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other
words, Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and by
having moral profundity. In both ways it illuminates man; it gives him
a satisfying sense of reality; it reconciles him with himself and the
Universe. The greatest poets unite in themselves the faculty of both
kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral. But it is
observable that in the poets who unite both kinds, the latter (the moral)
usually ends by making itself the master. In Shakespeare the two kinds
seem wonderfully to balance each other; but even in him the balance
leans; his expression tends to become too little sensuous and simple, too
much intellectualized. The same thing may be yet more strongly affirmed
of Lucretius and of Wordsworth.”

It is not, however, with moral but with naturalistic interpretation that
we have now to do. And in this faculty of naturalistic interpretation,
perhaps no poet—certainly no modern poet—equals Keats. In him, as Mr.
Arnold says, “the faculty is overpoweringly predominant. The natural
magic is perfect; when he speaks of the outward world he speaks almost
like Adam naming, by Divine inspiration, the creatures; his expression
corresponds with the thing’s essential reality.”

Does not Keats thus bring home to us the meaning—the inner secret—of the
ocean, and the impression it makes on the human heart, when he speaks of

    “The voice mysterious, which whoso hears
    Must think on what will be, and what has been?”

It is he that interprets the meaning of the summer midnight among the
woods, when he says—

            “Upon a tranced summer night
    Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
    Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
    Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
    Save from one gradual solitary gust
    Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
    As if the ebbing air had but one wave.”

Or take one more instance. All know the stern, almost grim, feeling of
solitude about some little crag-engirdled lochan or tarn far up the heart
of a Highland mountain. Who has given this feeling of grim solitude,
so death-like that any living thing or sound startles you there, as
Wordsworth, by these two strokes?—

    “There sometimes doth a leaping fish
      Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
    The crags repeat the raven’s croak
      In symphony austere.”

Or again, who has not felt as though he had a new revelation made to him
about the starry sky and the mountain-stillness after reading for the
first time these two well-known lines?—

    “The silence that is in the starry sky,
    The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

Or once more: who has so called up the impression produced by the sound
of waters heard among the mountains as Wordsworth, when he thus speaks?—

                        “In mute repose
    To lie and listen to the mountain-flood
    Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.”

But I have dwelt too long on this aspect of Poetry, its penetrating power
of naturalistic interpretation when the poet,

    “With an eye made quiet by the power
    Of harmony and the deep power of joy,”

is given to see into the life of things, and seeing, makes us share his
insight, makes us partakers for a moment at least in

                    “That blessed mood
    In which the burthen of the mystery,
    In which the heavy and the weary weight
    Of all this unintelligible world
    Is lightened.”

Even if it be but a transient glance, a momentary lightening of the
burden that he lends us, it is one of the most intimate and delicate
services—one of the highest and rarest functions which the poet or any
man can perform.


VIII.

Once more: the last and highest way in which Nature ministers to the soul
and spirit of man is when it becomes to him a symbol translucent with the
light of the moral and spiritual world. Or, in other words, the highest
use to which Imagination can put this visible world is, to gather from it
some tidings of the world invisible.

This use is seen when the sights and sounds of Nature, coming in through
eye and ear to the soul, hint at and foreshow “a higher life than this
daily one, a brighter world than that we see.” It is Coleridge who has
said that “it has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages,
it is the poetry of all human life, to read the book of Nature in a
figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and symbols of the
spiritual world.” That this is no mere fanciful use to make of Nature,
that in cultivating the habit of thus reading it we are cultivating a
power which is grounded in reason and the truth of things, can hardly be
doubted, if we believe that the things we see, and the mind that sees
them, have one common origin, come from one Universal Mind, which gives
being to and upholds both alike. This seeing of spiritual truths mirrored
in the face of Nature rests not on any fancied, but in a real analogy
between the natural and the spiritual worlds. They are, in some sense
which Science has not ascertained, but which the vital and religious
imagination can perceive, counterparts the one of the other The highest
authority for this belief, as well as its truest exemplification, we have
in the Parables of our Lord. It was on this truth that He grounded a
large part of his teaching.

I need but allude to what is so familiar; only let us, before we pass
on, think of what is implied in this teaching, which we have all known
from our childhood,—the growth of the Divine life in the soul represented
by the growth of the corn seed in the furrow, the end of the world or
of this æon set forth by the reapers and the harvest. Simple as this
teaching is, level to the child’s capacity, it yet involves a truth that
lies deeper than any philosopher has yet penetrated, even the hidden bond
that connects things visible with things invisible.

Archbishop Trench has said well on this subject:[11]—“On this rests
the possibility of a real and not a merely arbitrary teaching by
Parables—that the world of Nature is throughout a witness for the world
of spirit, proceeding from the same hand, growing out of the same
root, and constituted for that very end. All lovers of truth readily
acknowledge these mysterious harmonies. To them the things on earth are
copies of the things in heaven. They know that the earthly tabernacle is
made after the pattern of things seen in the Mount, and the question of
the Angel in Milton often forces itself on their meditations—

                            ‘What if earth
    Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
    Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?’”

But to leave these heights of inspired teaching, we find everywhere the
more meditative poets deriving from visible Nature hints at that which
eye has not seen nor ear heard. One of the simplest and most child-like
instances of this that occurs to me is that beautiful thought of Isaac
Walton:—

    “How joyed my heart in the rich melodies
    That overhead and round me did arise!
    The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow—
    Delicious music hung on every bough.
    Then said I, in my heart, If that the Lord
    Such lovely music on the earth accord;
    If to weak sinful man such sounds are given—
    Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!”

Something of the same thought comes out in a more reflective way in many
of the poems of Henry Vaughan,[12] a writer of the same age as Walton,
and one, like him, now less known and read than he deserves to be. Take
the following, in which Vaughan speaks of the vivid insight of his
childhood in a strain in which some have thought that they overheard the
first note of that tone which Wordsworth has sounded more fully in his
“Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”. It is thus Vaughan speaks of his
childhood:—

    “Happy those early days when I
    Shined in my angel-infancy;
    When yet I had not walked above
    A mile or two from my first love,
    And looking back, at that short space,
    Could see a glimpse of _His_ bright face
    When on some gilded cloud or flower
    My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
    And in those weaker glories spy
    Some shadows of eternity;
    And feel through all this fleshly dress
    Bright shootes of everlastingness.”

Such thoughts may be deemed by some to be fanciful and not practical.
Certainly they are not much in vogue at the present time. But as one has
said, “I cannot conceive a use of our knowledge more practical than to
make it connect the sight of this world with the thought of another.”
Nor can any be more needed by us, or more consolatory. For is it not the
experience of each individual as he grows more thoughtful, as well as the
experience of the race, that the visible, the outward, cannot satisfy?
Is it not the very best element in man that makes him feel forever after
something higher, deeper, more enduring than the things he sees? If we
turn aside from this tendency, and seek to quench it, we do so at the
cost of destroying that which is the best, the noblest inheritance of our
humanity,—the piece of divinity in us.

This suggestive power of Nature, and its unsufficingness, have been felt
by all men who have any glimpse of the ideal in them; by none has it been
more deeply felt, or more adequately expressed, than by him, the great
preacher—poet as well as preacher—of our age. I mean, Dr. Newman. As the
prose words in which he expresses this feeling are in the highest sense
poetry, I cannot, I think, do better than give the thought in his own
perfect language. He is speaking in the opening of Spring:—

“Let these be your thoughts, especially in this Spring season, when the
whole face of Nature is so rich and beautiful. Once only in the year yet
once, does the world which we see show forth its hidden powers, and in a
manner manifest itself. Then there is a sudden rush and burst outwardly
of that hidden life which God has lodged in the material world. Well,
that shows you, as by a sample, what it can do at his command, when He
gives the word. This earth which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms,
will one day burst forth into a new world of light and glory. Who would
think, except from his experience of former Springs all through his
life, who could conceive two or three months before that it was possible
that the face of Nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so
splendid and varied? How different is a prospect when leaves are on it,
and off it! How unlikely it would seem before the event that the dry and
naked branches should suddenly be clothed with what is so bright and so
refreshing! Yet in God’s good time leaves come on the trees. The season
may delay, but come it will at last.

“So it is with the coming of that eternal Spring for which all Christians
are waiting. Come it will, though it delay. Therefore we say day by day,
Thy kingdom come; which means, O Lord, show thyself—manifest thyself. The
earth that we see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but
a promise of something beyond it; even when it is gayest, with all its
blossoms on, and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it, yet it is not
enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see.... What we see is
the outward shell of an eternal kingdom, and on that kingdom we fix the
eyes of our faith.... Bright as is the sun and sky and the clouds, green
as are the leaves and the fields, sweet as is the singing of the birds,
we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for
the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God
himself, but they are not his fullness; they speak of heaven, but they
are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of his
image; they are but crumbs from the table. We are looking for the coming
of the day of God, when all this outward world, fair though it be, shall
perish.... We can bear the loss, for we know it will be but the removing
of a veil. We know, that to remove the world which is seen will be the
manifestation of the world which is not seen. We know that what we see is
a screen hiding from us God and Christ, and his saints and angels; and we
earnestly desire and pray for the dissolution of all that we see, from
our longing after that which we do not see.”

Such are the thoughts and longings which the sight of the vernal earth
can awaken in a spiritual mind well used to heavenly meditations.

If some of us are so sense-bound that such thoughts seem fantastic and
unreal to them, all that can be said is, The more’s the pity. Even the
best among us will probably not venture to appropriate such thoughts
as if these were our habitual companions, but they may have in some
brighter moments known them. At all events they know what they mean, and
are assured that as they themselves grow in spirituality, the beauty
that clothes this visible world, while it soothes, does not suffice, but
becomes more and more the hint and prophecy of a higher beauty which
their heart longs for.

And now, in looking back on these several ways in which poets have
handled Nature, two thoughts suggest themselves:—

1. The ways I have noted are far from exhausting all the possible or even
actual modes in which poets deal with Nature, or, in other words, in
which Nature lends itself to the poet’s service. They are but a few of
the most prominent and obvious. It may interest some to look for others,
and to add them to the classification here given.

2. Though one mode may be more prominent in one poet, and one in another,
yet no poet is limited to only one, or even two, of these several ways
of adapting Nature to his purposes. In the works of the greatest poets,
those of largest and most varied range, perhaps every one of these modes,
and more besides, may be found. To find out and arrange under heads all
the ways in which say Shakespeare and Milton deal with Nature, would be
an interesting study for any one who is young, and has leisure for it.

With one reflection I close this part of my subject. Any one who has
ever been brought to meditate on the relation which the abstractions
of mathematics bear to the Laws of Nature must have felt how exceeding
wonderful it is. A system of thought evoked out of pure intelligence has
been found reflected and, as it were, embodied in the actual movements of
the heavenly bodies, and bringing the whole Physical Cosmos within the
power of man’s thought—

    “From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
    From system on to system, without end.”

Such a one, I say, must have been filled with wonder at this marvelous
adaptation and correspondence between the mind of transitory man and the
vast movements of the most remote and permanent of material things.

A like, though a different, wonder must arise when we reflect how,
in the various modes above noted, and no doubt in many more, outward
Nature lends itself to be the material in which so many of man’s highest
thoughts and emotions can work and embody themselves.

Of the poets and this visible world we may truly say,—

    “They took the whole earth for their toy,
      They played with it in every mood;
    A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,
      They treated Nature as they would.”

He who has once perceived the wonderful adaptation which exists between
the mind of man and the external world—how exquisitely the individual
mind, as well as the mind of the race, is fitted to the world, and the
external world fitted to the mind,—if he has once vividly felt the
reality of this adaptation, he must have paused in wonder at himself,
and at the world that encompasses him, and become penetrated with an
immediate conviction, deeper than all arguments can reach, that the
reasonable soul within him, and the material world without him, which on
so many sides is seen to be the embodiment of reason, and which yields up
its secret to man’s intelligence, and is so plastic to his imagination
and emotions,—that these two existences so answering to each other,
and so strangely communing with each other, are both rooted in the one
Central and Universal Intelligence which embraces and upholds both Nature
and Man.



CHAPTER IX.

NATURE IN HEBREW POETRY, AND IN HOMER.


The method pursued in this book has been, beginning with some general
views, from these to descend to special illustrations, in order to
exemplify what has been said of Poetry in a general way, by pointing to
the several methods which the poets have actually followed in delineating
Nature and her aspects.

It will be but to carry out somewhat more in detail the same procedure
if I now adduce a few samples of the way in which some of the greatest
poets of each age and country have in their works shown their feeling
towards Nature. To exhaust this subject would require a large treatise.
A chapter or two is all that can here be afforded to it. In glancing
thus, which is all we can do, at a few of the great mountain-summits of
song, many a lesser elevation in the long line of poetry, that might well
repay attention, must needs be passed in silence. I shall begin with the
earliest poets we know, and come down to those near our own time. In
such a survey it is to the East that the eye naturally turns, and there
especially to the singers of Israel; for, as to the view of Nature which
the Hindu Vedas may contain, this is a subject on which I do not venture,
since at best I could but repeat at second-hand what others have said.

In considering the views of Nature presented by Hebrew poetry, it is not
to the account of the creation in Genesis that we turn, but to the many
passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job, in which the
aspects of the outward world, as they appeared to those old seers, are
delineated. Humboldt and many others have remarked that the description
by the Hebrew Poets of the material world everywhere reflects their faith
in the unity of God, and in his immediate presence in all creation. The
world is described, not so much in detail, but as a whole, in its vast
expanses and great movements; or, if individual objects are dwelt on, as
in the Book of Job, it is as the visible witnesses to the transcendent
power of the Invisible One. Nature is nowhere spoken of as an independent
and self-subsistent power, but rather as the outer chamber of an Unseen
Presence—a garment, a veil, which the Eternal One is ever ready to break
through. These characteristics, which pervade the entire poetry of the
Old Testament, are perhaps nowhere seen so condensed as in that crowning
hymn of the visible creation, the 104th Psalm.

This Psalm presents, as has often been remarked, a picture of the entire
Universe, which for completeness, for breadth, and for grandeur, is
unequaled in any other literature. Where else, in human language, shall
we find the whole Universe, the heavens and the earth, and the ongoings
of man in the midst of them, sketched, as here, in a “few bold strokes”?—

“The Lord covereth himself with light as with a garment. He hath
stretched the heavens like a canopy. He laid the foundation of the round
world that it should not be removed forever. The waters springing in the
mountains descend into the valleys, unto the places which the Lord hath
appointed for them, that they may never pass the bounds which He hath
set them. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the
hills, to give drink to every beast of the field, for the wild asses
to quench their thirst.... Beside them the birds of the air sing among
the branches.” The fruits of the field, too, are there; grass and green
herb; the labors of man, wine and oil of olive; all the creatures, the
conies, the wild goats, the lions roaring after their prey, and seeking
their meat from God. There, too, is the great and wide sea, and the
wondrous creatures it contains, and the heavenly bodies are rounding in
the whole. And then that touching contrast between the moving life of
the elements and the quiet yet laborious life of man, encompassed by
these vast movements,—“Man goeth forth unto his work and his labor until
the evening.” And all this picture of the Universe contained within
thirty-five short verses! Besides this, the special Psalm of the visible
creation, there is the 65th Psalm, and many another passage in the
Psalms, which describe so touchingly the way in which God deals with the
earth through natural processes.

Again, I need hardly refer to the Book of Job, especially from the 37th
to the 41st chapters, where both single appearances of the world and the
arrangement of the whole are depicted in language which has graven itself
on the heart of all nations: “The Lord walks on the heights of the sea,
on the ridges of the towering waves heaped up by the storm.” Or again:
“The morning dawn illumines the border of the earth, and moulds variously
the canopy of clouds as the hand of man moulds the ductile clay.”

Or turn again to the great poet-prophet Isaiah. Here you find no detailed
descriptions, but all Nature fused and molten before the intense fire,
now of his indignation, now of his adoring awe, now of his spiritual joy;
one moment lifting his eyes to the midnight heavens as the proof and
witness of the Divine Omnipotence; another, in his soul’s exultation over
God’s redemptive mercy, calling aloud to the heavens to sing, and the
lower parts of the earth to shout for joy, “Break forth into singing, ye
mountains, O forest and every tree therein.”

But this transport comes from no mere love of Nature. It has a deeper
origin. It is for that Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have
mercy upon his afflicted. This is the solemn spiritual joy in which he
calls on the heavens and the earth to sympathize.

The following seem to be some of the chief notes of Hebrew poetry in its
dealing with Nature:—

1. Nature, as we have seen, is never represented as an independent power
or as resplendent with her own beauty, but as the direct creation,
one might almost say, the garment of the great Jehovah. In fact it is
remarkable that the word Nature, in the sense we now use it in, never
occurs in the Bible. Neither the word nor the thing, as a separate
entity, seems ever to have been present to the Hebrew mind. In everything
they saw or heard God himself as immediately present, ready as it were to
rend the veil and manifest himself.

2. The sober, truthful estimate of all things in the external world.
They are spoken of exactly as they are. There is no temptation to make
too much of them; for He who is behind them and who made them is so
much greater, so much more present to thought, that reverence for Him
precludes exaggeration. The accuracy of the Bible descriptions of these
things is quite unexampled in other literature.[13] This faithfulness to
fact, this veneration for natural truth, this feeling that things are too
sacred to be exaggerated or distorted, or in any way trifled with, comes
directly from the habit of regarding all visible Nature as created and
continually upheld by One Omnipresent God. Habitual reverence for Him
from whom they come sobers the writers and makes them truthful.

3. Connected with this is the absence of all tendency to theorize or
frame hypotheses about Nature’s ongoings. This of course comes from
the pervading habit of referring all effects directly to the Divine
will; and yet there is no want of philosophic wonder, for, as Humboldt
remarks, the Book of Job proposes many questions about natural things
“which modern science enables us to propound more formally, and to clothe
in more scientific language, but not to solve satisfactorily.” Lastly,
there is a deep-hearted pathos, “a yearning pensiveness,” as it has been
called, in the Hebrew poetry, over man’s mortal condition, as when in
images straight from Nature it describes his life here as “a wind that
passeth away and cometh not again,” or “as a flower of the field so he
flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place
thereof shall know it no more.” Simple images, yet how true for all
generations!


HOMER.

When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by
the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It
is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature,
mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It
is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not
the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of
the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully
developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep.

No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known
to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as
Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various
in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the
sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid
between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad
or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on
every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing
through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land
every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.

If of all nations the Greeks were endowed with the keenest sensibility to
beauty, and if Homer was their chief and representative poet, it could
hardly be but that scenery so varied should melt into his imagination and
reflect itself in his poetry. And so it is. Homer lived most probably
on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where he had ever before his eye the
island-studded Ægean, behind him the rich valleys opening down to the
coast, and eastward the great mountain ranges where these rivers are
cradled; could it be that of all this his poetry should give no sign?
I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of the Homeric scenery. You
will find it in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” chapter xiii.,
on Classical Landscape. Like everything which Mr. Ruskin writes, it is
interesting and suggestive, but I cannot think it adequate or wholly
true. Of the Greeks he says: “They shrank with dread or hatred from
all the ruggedness of lower nature—from the wrinkled forest bark and
the jagged hill-crest, and irregular inorganic storm of sky, looking
to these for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only
in such portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the
rest and health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its
gentler beauty.” Again he says: “As far as I recollect, without a single
exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed
of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove.” Again: “It is sufficiently
notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells
delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the
inhabitants of mountainous countries do; but the inhabitants of the
plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.”

Now, in this passage, the general assertion seems to be much too
sweeping, and, in the special instance of Homer, I think it is not true.
Mr. Ruskin backs his position by reference to various passages in the
Odyssey which seem to bear him out, but in any fair estimate we must take
in the Iliad as well as the Odyssey.

In the Iliad the descriptions of Nature are not so detailed as in the
Odyssey. Indeed, they occur almost entirely in similes; but these the
poet fetches from every realm and feature of Nature—from the mountain,
the forest, the sea, especially as seen darkening under the coming of
the western breeze; from the cloudy and the midnight sky; from all kinds
of wild animals, the lion, the fawn, the hawk, and the boar. In his
battle-scenes it is to all the sterner and fiercer aspects of Nature,
and habits of wild beasts, that he has recourse for his comparisons. And
would he have so often invoked the aid of these wild forces and creatures
of his imagination had not he delighted in them?

So when Teucer slays Mentor, it is thus, as rendered by Lord Derby:—

                        “Down he fell,
    As by the woodman’s axe, on some high peak
    Falls a proud ash, conspicuous from afar,
    Leveling its tender leaves upon the ground.”

It is thus the charge of Hector is described when he beat back the Greeks
and penned them at their ships:—

    “On poured the Trojan masses; in the van
    Hector straight forward drove in full career.
    As some huge bowlder, from its rocky bed
    Detached, and by the wintry torrent’s force
    Hurled down the steep cliff’s face, when constant rains
    The massive rock’s firm hold have undermined;
    With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood
    Resounds beneath it; still it hurries on,
    Until, arriving at the level plain,
    Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more.”

Or take another similitude drawn from the sea. When the poet wishes to
describe how the Achæan phalanxes come on to battle, this is the image he
employs:—

    “And as a goatherd from his watch-tower crag
    Beholds a cloud advancing o’er the sea
    Beneath the west wind’s breath; as from afar
    He gazes, black as pitch, it sweeps along
    O’er the dark face of ocean, bearing on
    A hurricane of rain; he, shuddering, sees
    And drives his flock beneath the sheltering cave.
    So thick and dark about the Argives stirred,
    Impatient for the war, the stalwart youths,
    Black masses, bristling close with spear and shield.”

Or again, when, after Agamemnon has retired wounded from the battle,
Hector comes forth and slips his Trojans on the Achæan host, as some
hunter slips his white-teethed hounds on a wild boar or a lion, and
himself

    “Fell on their battle, as some roaring storm
    Leaps down and heaves the sleeping violet sea.”

One after another he lays low the chiefs, and their names fill three
hexameters.

                      “Of the leaders these
    He slew, then on the nameless people fell
    As when with hurricane deep the west wind smites
    White summer clouds high piled by the clear south,
    And volumed wave on wave comes shoreward rolled,
    And the white flying foam is scattered high
    Before the loud blast of far-wandering wind.”

Let me now give one instance of Homer’s feeling for the aspect of the
nightly heavens. It shall be taken from the place of the Iliad where the
Trojans, after a day of successful battle, having driven back the Greeks,
rest for the night. And here I shall quote, not, as in the above passage,
from Lord Derby’s translation, but from a rendering of the passage by
the Poet-Laureate. It is the only passage of Homer in which we have the
Laureate’s handiwork:—

    “So Hector said, and sea-like roared his host,
    Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,
    And each beside his chariot bound his own,
    And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep
    In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine
    And bread from out their houses brought, and heaped
    Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain
    Rolled the rich vapor far into the heaven.
    And there all night upon the bridge of war
    Sat glorying, many a fire before them blazed;
    As when in heaven the stars about the moon
    Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
    And every height comes out, and jutting peak
    And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
    Break open to their highest, and all the stars
    Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart;
    So many a fire between the ships and stream
    Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy.
    A thousand on the plain; and close by each
    Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
    And champing golden grain the horses stood
    Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.”

These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad
show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution,
and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like.

True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for
its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets.
He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for
description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host
in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical
landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in
his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,”
“many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in
the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus;
windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks.

I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more
passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the
conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with
the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains
and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to
take part in the great issue.

But I must pass on to the scenery of the Odyssey. No doubt this poem
contains much more description of landscape than the Iliad, and in that
description, as Mr. Ruskin says, there seems to be a preference for
the tame and domestic rather than for the wild in Nature. But is there
not enough in the subject and circumstance of the two poems to account
for such difference? Ulysses, the much-traveled, much-suffering man,
who had endured so many things by land and sea, his home-sick heart is
yearning for his native Ithaca. That his heart should be weary of the sea
and the mountains and all wild untractable things is only too natural.
It is quite in keeping with and as a set-off against this feeling of
home-weariness that the poet, in describing such a wanderer, should dwell
with peculiar emphasis on all that is warm and comfortable and home-like
in scenery.

Let me give one or two samples from Worsley’s translation of the
Odyssey, which I am disposed to think is the best poetic translation of
any classical poet that we have in English. Mr. Worsley rendered the
hexameters of Homer into the Spenserian stanza, and he so perfectly
caught the whole rhythm and cadence of Spenser, and this answers so well
to the spirit of the Odyssey, the most romantic of Greek poems, that I
know no more delightful reading than those picturesque and melodious
stanzas.

Here is one sample. Ulysses, having left Calypso’s island on a raft, is
shipwrecked in mid-seas, and this is the description of his coming to
land on the island of Phæacia:—

    “Two nights and days in the tumultuous swell
    He wandered. Often did his heart forebode
    Utter extinction in the yawning hell,
    But when the fair-haired Dawn arising glowed,
    And in the eastern heaven the thin light showed,
    Came a calm-deepening day, windless and clear.
    Then when Odysseus on a tall wave rode,
    And his keen eyes along the heaving mere
    Stretched in extreme desire, he saw the land rise near.

    “As when a father, on the point to die,
    Who for long time in sore disease hath lain,
    By the strong Fates tormented heavily,
    Till the pulse faileth for exceeding pain,
    Feels the life stirring in his bones again;
    While glad at heart his children smile around,
    He also smiles—the gods have loosed his chain;
    So welcome seemed the land with forest crowned,
    And he rejoicing swam, and yearned to feel the ground.

    “But now within a voice-throw of the rocks
    The sound of waters did his ears appall.
    Full on the coast the great waves’ thunder-shocks
    Roll, and afar the wet foam-vapors fall.
    No roadstead there, no haven seemed at all,
    Nor shelter where a ship might rest at ease;
    But from the main-earth darted a wild wall
    Of headlands. Then Odysseus’ heart and knees
    Were loosened; and his soul thus spake in the deep seas.”

Then follows a fine description of his struggle with the breakers, and
how his flesh was torn and his skin peeled against the sharp rocks:—

    “He from the echoing breakers swam right fain,
    Skirting the coast; if chance his eyes explore
    Or far or near some haven of the main,
    Or mild declivity of shelving shore.
    But when he came the river-month before,
    And his gaze rested on the long white gleam,
    By rocks unchafed and windless evermore,
    Here to his thought best landing-place did seem,
    And in his soul he prayed, feeling the calm sweet stream.”

Then the landing and climbing up into the wood, and hiding himself under
a mound of gathered leaves:—

                “Where o’er his weary head,
    Athene all night long pain-healing slumber shed.”

But I recommend every one to read the last hundred lines of the fifth
book of the Odyssey. It is one of the most natural and beautiful
descriptions of sea-coast scenery, heightened in its interest by the
presence of man in strife with the waters, that is to be found in any
poet.

The whole of this passage is commented on by Mr. Ruskin at length, but I
think his comments are one-sided and overdone. No doubt the shipwrecked
man kisses the corn-growing land when at last he reaches it, and gladly
covers himself with the dead leaves. But it is not, as Mr. Ruskin says,
that the Greek mind shrank from wild things, and took pleasure only in
things subservient to human use. It is because it was the action natural
to a shipwrecked man just escaped from the hateful sea to hug the land he
had so much toil to reach; and it was natural for a poet, when describing
his hero tossed and drenched for days amid the hungry foam, to bring
out in strong contrast all the warmth and comfort of the dry cheerful
earth.[14]

One sample of Homer’s home-painting must be given, where we see—

            “All things are in order stored—
            A home of ancient peace;”—

    “Outside the court-yard stretched a planted space
    Of orchard, and a fence environed all the place.

    “There, in full prime, the orchard-trees grew tall,
    Sweet-fig, pomegranate, apple fruited fair,
    Pear and the healthful olive. Each and all
    Both summer droughts and chills of winter spare.
    All the year round they flourish. Some the air
    Of zephyr warms to life, some doth mature,
    Apple grows old on apple, pear on pear,
    Fig follows fig, vintage doth vintage lure;
    Thus the rich revolution doth for age endure.

    “With well-sunned floor for drying, there is seen
    The vineyard. Here the grapes they cull, there tread.
    Here falls the blossom from the clusters green,
    There the first blushings by the suns are shed.
    Last, flowers forever fadeless, bed by bed;
    Two streams: one waters the whole garden fair;
    One through the court-yard, near the house is led,
    Whereto with pitcher all the folk repair.
    All these the God-sent gifts to King Alcinous were.”

I might go on to quote the description of Calypso’s cave, and many
another landscape with which this Greek romance abounds. Indeed, it would
take a summer day to exhaust the passages descriptive of Nature in the
Odyssey and the Iliad alone, before we could arrive at an adequate idea
of the Homeric view of Nature. This only I will say and pass on—that
in the Odyssey you do find that the scenes most lovingly depicted are
home scenes of order, comfort, and repose. But this is not because, as
Mr. Ruskin says, the Greek mind abhorred the wildness of nature, but
because, with such a character to describe as Ulysses, battered by the
strokes of doom, travel-weary and home-sick, the natural framework to
such a human figure, that which gives at once contrast and relief, is a
setting taken from the reposeful side of Nature. Of storm and trouble
you have had enough in the human character. Nature here must furnish the
background of repose. But in the Iliad, if we look at the similes, we
find them taken from every form and aspect of Nature—the wild and vast
as well as the homely and the minute. The poet gathers images from every
element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not
for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out
by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the
substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a
storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly
in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though
unconscious love.



CHAPTER X.

NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL.


When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all
the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets,
we feel that we have passed into a wholly different atmosphere. If
there were no other there is at least this cardinal distinction between
them:—The Greeks had no antiquity behind them, at least no earlier
literature to come between them and the open face of things. They saw at
first hand with their own eyes, felt with their own hearts, described
in their own words. The Romans, those at least of the literary age,
before they wrote a line that has come down to us, had received the whole
Hellenic learning and poetry poured in upon them, so that the very air of
Italy was colored with the hues of Greece. This makes it so difficult, in
studying the productions of any Roman poet—their descriptions of Nature
not less than other things—to be sure that you have the features of
Italian scenery pure and uncolored, and that they have not been tinged
and refracted by the Hellenic medium of associations and language through
which they were habitually beheld. No doubt the Romans originally were
and never ceased to be a country-loving people. The pictures that have
come down to us of Cincinnatus, and of other worthies of the early
Republic, represent even their greatest generals and dictators as living
on paternal farms in rural thrift and simplicity. But there remains no
poetry coeval with that primitive time. Before we reach their poets the
day of small estates and patrician life in the fields is over, all Italy
is held in vast domains by rich senators who themselves lived in the
city, and committed the care of their lands to a bailiff with hordes of
slaves.

In the last half-century of the Republic, to which belong the earliest
Roman poets who describe Nature, the town life, varied by retirement to
the Tiburtine or Sabine villa, was universal among the poets and their
associates. Some of them had passed their childhood in the rustic life of
distant provinces, and the remembrance of that life still lives in their
poetry, as in Catullus, and more distinctively in Virgil. The earliest
pictures of Nature that occur in any Roman poetry are to be found not
in pastoral or idyl, but in the great philosophic poem that expounds an
elaborate system of Nature. Lucretius was too earnest a preacher of his
Atomic Philosophy to linger over descriptions of scenery for their own
sake. Nevertheless, his wearisome expositions of materialistic system are
relieved by many a beautiful illustration drawn directly from the Nature
which his own eyes had seen, and portrayed with a clearness of outline
and a startling vividness, in which, as Professor Sellar has truly said,
he is unrivaled in antiquity save by Homer. The rigorous dogmatism of
a mechanical philosophy is in him combined with the keenest eye to all
the appearances of the outer world, minute as well as vast. Evidently he
had lived much in the open air, had been a haunter of all waste places,
wild mountain ranges, dripping caves, solitary sea-shores. He had noted
all the sights, listened to the sounds and the silences, and observed
the ways of the wild creatures that dwell there. His impressions he has
stamped in many a noble line, that comes in with delightful freshness to
illustrate his prolix argument. His eye was upon the smallest and most
sequestered appearances, as the many-colored shells on the shore, and
the dripping of water over moss-covered rocks; but still more familiarly
did his imagination move with the great elemental movements of Nature,
and when the storms and winds were up, he found himself “one among the
many there.” According to the philosophy he had adopted, and earnestly
propounded, all the most beautiful and mysterious aspects of things were
the mere products of dead mechanic forces. But the genius of the poet
at times shook itself free from the trammels of his creed, and rose to
the contemplation, not of a dead mechanic world, but of one informed by
a vast life, which moves through all material things, and makes them
instinct with unity.

In the language of the philosophers, while consciously he taught only a
_Natura naturata_, his imagination and sympathy grasped, in spite of him,
a _Natura naturans_. It is impossible that any great poet, however his
understanding may be caught in the meshes of mere materialism, can in
his hours of inspiration rest contented with that. Assuredly Lucretius
did not. Accordingly, we find him here and there breaking out into the
earliest utterance of that mystical Pantheistic feeling about the life of
Nature, which we shall find reappearing in Virgil, and which has recurred
so powerfully in modern poetry.

Catullus, the poet contemporary with Lucretius, is too much absorbed in
love and friendship, finds too exciting an interest in the society of
man, to give much time to Nature. In his most original poems, or at least
those in which he most speaks out his feelings, Nature holds little,
almost no place. Two poems refer to his villa at Tibur, with, however,
little mention of any rural pleasures connected with it.

The well-known lines on his return to his home at Sirmio, on the Lago
di Garda, for all their wonderful charm, breathe more of the love of
home and rest after long voyaging than of enjoyment in Nature for her
own sake. His more elaborate and artistic poems contain some beautiful
natural images and similes, expressed with that unstudied felicity and
clear sense of beauty which distinguished him. But they do not come to
more than side glances by the way, as he hurries on to his human theme.
It has, however, been remarked, that while to Lucretius, to Horace, even
to Virgil, the sea is a thing of dread rather than of admiration, from
which they shrank as a treacherous creature, Catullus felt the grandeur
of its immensity, and rejoiced in the laughter of the waves in calm, and
in their changing colors beneath the storm.

Germans have written learned books, some to maintain, others to deny,
that the ancient Greeks and Romans had any feeling for Nature, or, as
the phrase goes, were inspired by the sentiment of Nature. Schiller has
gone as far as to deny that Homer had any more caring for Nature than
he had for the garment, the shield, the armor, which he describes with
equal relish. In the face of such an assertion we have but to read a few
passages from Homer above cited, and innumerable others like them. No
doubt the ancients had not that intimate, delicate, dwelling sympathy
for Nature which we call the modern feeling. But there is hardly a tone
of sentiment which Nature in modern times has evoked, of which some
faint prelude at least might not be found among them. Passages from the
dialogue, and especially from the choruses, of Sophocles and Euripides,
might, had we time, have been cited, which speak of natural objects with
almost as much fondness as though they had been written yesterday.

One side of this feeling, which is dwelt on as peculiarly a birth of
recent times, is the passion for mountains. And no doubt the feeling of
the Latin poets as they thought of them was for the most part shuddering
and affright. Yet Virgil, though he generally speaks the same language,
seems at times to catch something of their free and far delight, as
when he speaks of Father Apennine roaring with all his holm-oaks, and
rejoicing to heave his snow-white summit into the sky. In such a passage
it would seem as though the power of hills was for a moment on him, and
he caught a prophetic glimpse of that mountain-rapture which was reserved
for this century at last adequately to express. Quinctilian, however,
represents the current feeling of his countrymen when he says, “Species
maritimis, planis, amœnis,”—Beauty belongs to countries that lie beside
the sea, level and pleasant.

But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus
limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to
point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early
recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:—

                  “Molle atque facetum
    Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—

To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic
skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet
appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil afterwards produced,
among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of
natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have
won for him.

With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional
character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known.
But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real,
borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later
critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as
the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from
Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are
set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag
from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long
shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the
neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert
that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near
the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery
there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes
had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and
slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe
of tender reeds.

Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from the Sicilian
poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere translator, but proves
by the tender grace of the language in which he clothes the borrowed
imagery his feeling for original Nature. In the fifth Eclogue, when two
shepherds have been playing each his finest strain, partly to please,
partly to emulate the other, at the close, Menalcas says to Mopsus:—

    “Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!
    As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,
    Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”

And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of Mopsus:—

    “What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?
    For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south
      wind,
    Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,
    Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”

Of these and such-like images the first hints may have been from
Theocritus, but assuredly they have won a new charm in their passage
through the mind of Virgil.

But if the scenery of the Eclogues partakes in some measure of the
conventional mould in which the whole of the poems are cast, the
_Georgics_ are poetry in earnest, dealing with a real subject, and
describing, in many places at least, real landscapes. Doubtless here,
too, as everywhere, Virgil is the learned poet; his mind comes to his
subject laden with the spoils of all antiquity. As he describes natural
objects, all the associations which ancient Mythology and Greek poetry
had thrown around them use spontaneously before him. Thus he would
often seem to look at things not at first-hand with his own eyes, but
through the media which former poets had fashioned for him. But this, if
we think of it, is one element of the consummate art of the Georgics.
The poet had to raise a homely subject above the dust of commonplace,
to add dignity to objects and processes which in themselves might seem
undignified, or even vulgar. Therefore he takes the husbandman back to
earlier times, and invests his toils with all the veneration and sanctity
which primeval tradition has shed around them, and teaches him to feel
that in his pursuits he is one with the first forefathers of the race.
This archaic coloring, richly yet delicately suffused, invests the poem
with a peculiar charm. Just so a modern poet, wishing to throw around the
life of shepherd and husbandman, even in our own days, an air of ancient
reverence, might still revert to Bible stories of the patriarchs—to Jacob
and Rachel meeting by the well, to Ruth in the corn-field, and David
among the sheep-cotes of Bethlehem. But making full allowance for all
that is archaic and mythological in the allusions to distant ages and
Eastern lands, there remains a large background of landscape in which the
plains of Mantua and Campania lie spread before us, and the intense skies
of Italy bend overhead.

Such a passage as the following is surely the work of one who had
watched and loved the alternations of the Italian summer:—

    “But when glad summer at the west winds’ call
    Shall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,
    Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fields
    Let browse thy sheep and goats, while morn is young,
    And the fresh dew lies hoary on the grass—
    The dew on tender blade, to cattle dear.
    When the fourth hour of day brings parching thirst,
    And in the trees cicadas’ notes are loud,
    Then bid the herd at wells and deep clear pools
    Drink the stream running from full oaken troughs.
    But in the deep noon heat a shady vale
    Seek, if perchance some oak of antique bulk
    There spread his giant boughs; or some grove dark
    With many a holm-oak’s gloom reposeth nigh
    In hallowed shadow. Then at set of sun
    Once more supply clear streams and drive afield
    Thy flock, when eventide cools all the air,
    And the moon dewy-moist repairs the lawns
    With freshness, while the shores with halcyon notes
    Resound, the copses with the goldfinch song.”

It has generally been held that one of the most prominent notes
of Virgil’s genius was his sympathy with Nature. To this the late
Professor Conington, whose opinion on whatever concerned Virgil deserves
all respect, used to demur, and to maintain rather that his chief
characteristic lay in an elaborate and refined culture, manifesting
itself in the most consummate delicacy and grace. But though Virgil was
before all things the poet of learned culture and artistic beauty, this
did not hinder, rather prompted him, to turn on Nature a sympathetic
and loving eye. The perception of a sympathy between the feelings and
vicissitudes of man and the world that surrounds him appears nowhere so
strongly as in his latest poem, the Æneid. It may have been that as his
subject led him much into battles and adventures, alien to his taste, he
seized all the more eagerly every opportunity of reverting to that Nature
which had been his earliest delight.

Whatever be the cause, the pictures of Nature, whether in description
or in simile, are more frequent, more intimate, more tender, than in
either of his earlier productions. It has been noticed, for instance,
that at the beginning of the sixth book, as the Sibyl draws nigh, the
earth rumbles, the mountains quake, as if sharing the human dread at her
approach; and that throughout the fourth book there is maintained a fine
sympathy between the aspects of the outer world and the passions which
agitate the human actors.

It is thus he sets off the tumult in the soul of the lovelorn and wronged
queen in contrast with the calm and silence of night:—

    “Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the grace
    Of quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:
    It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,
    And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,
    And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keep
    In thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,
    And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.
    But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,
    Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,
    Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”

Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its tone,
might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast between Nature’s
repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus consciously felt and
expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious age. In Homer you may see
such contrasts, as when Helen, looking from the walls of Troy, misses her
true brothers from among the Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof
from the war, fearing the reproach which she had brought on herself and
them. And the poet adds:—

    “So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered
    In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”

Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely,
not brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as
Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin poet’s
feeling is like that of our own day.

Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from his epic
narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate description of the
storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian Islands; the night
passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard thundering overhead through
the dark, in the third book; the island, in the fifth book, which is made
the goal round which the racing-boats row; the fleet entering the mouth
of the Tiber while the calm morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a
few which come to mind.

But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that the
Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the
fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s similes
to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now give have not
wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems small foundation for
it in their case.

In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a narrow and
sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty scraped through and
shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s comparison:—

    “As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,
    Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,
    Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinions
    Loudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm air
    Skims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”

Again, when Æneas, led by the Sibyl, descends to the nether world, and
arrives at the shores of the river Styx, the ghosts of the dead come
flocking round him in crowds:—

    “Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s
      cold
    Gliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward
      from the deep,
    When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into
      sunny lands.”

The full beauty, however, of passages like these cannot be felt when
they are detached from the whole scene, in which they are inlaid. Æneas
traveling far into the nether gloom, through Pluto’s empty halls and
ghastly realms of the dead, is a picture almost too dismal. But how
exquisitely does Virgil relieve his own heart and that of the reader, by
letting in on that sad world these glimpses of a land still gladdened by
the sun!

If you compare Virgil with Homer, where they describe the same natural
objects, or even where the Latin poet borrows his similes directly from
the Greek, you cannot but feel how wide is the difference between them.
There is no more the entire outwardness, the self-forgetting serenity of
Homer’s descriptions, the colorless transparency as of a mountain range,
whose every stone and blade of grass lies reflected in the clear depths
of an unmoving lake. Received into Virgil’s heart the outward world
becomes colored with some of the melancholy of the poet and his time. Not
that to Virgil’s eye there was any sadness in Nature herself, but in his
hands Nature becomes so humanized, it so lends itself to human joys and
sorrows, that these cast their own gleams, and still more their shadows,
on that, in itself, unimpassioned countenance. This sympathy between man
and Nature Virgil apprehended more feelingly than any other Roman poet;
and in this, as in so many other things, we find in him an anticipation
of the modern time. As compared with Lucretius, Virgil deals with Nature
in a less sublime, but more human way. Lucretius demands the explanation
of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to
catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: “Lucretius is
not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery,
to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on
condition that I may investigate and understand thee.” In Lucretius man
and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do
not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward
world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely
forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction,—satisfaction
as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of
childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.

Lucretius had, as we know, a philosophic faith about Nature, which
satisfied his understanding, if it did not satisfy what was deeper in him
than understanding—that high imagination and poetic instinct which at
times craved a more spiritual interpretation. Virgil, on the other hand,
had no consistent theory regarding that Nature which he apprehended so
feelingly. In general he acquiesced in the orthodox mythology which he
had received from the tradition of the poets. And yet, while he accepted
it for poetic, or even patriotic reasons, he must, when he thought of
it, have felt strange misgivings. For the mythologic faith had entirely
ceased, to be real to himself or to his educated countrymen. That he
longed at times to penetrate the secret of Nature, and to know the
causes of things, he himself assures us. But there is no evidence in
his poetry that he ever rose to as clear a conception of one all-ruling
Divine Power as even Cicero had probably reached. There are, however, two
well-known passages, one in the fourth Georgic, the other in the sixth
Æneid, in which Virgil expresses a mystic and pantheistic theory as to
an all-pervading life of the world, which, if it cannot be called his
philosophic belief, seems to have been to him at least more than a mere
poetic fancy. Lucretius, impelled by the craving of his imagination for
life, not death, had in the opening of his poem and elsewhere allowed
such a feeling, as it were, to escape him, but had never recognized
it as an article of his faith. In Virgil it approaches more nearly to
a consciously held belief, or at least to a possible solution of the
mystery of Nature. It has been reserved for modern times to give fuller
expression to the same tendency of thought, sometimes as a mere feeling,
sometimes as a conviction. But however such a view may have expressed
passing phases, either of thought or feeling, it has never, either now or
in ancient times, approached to be a solution which can satisfy at once
reason, heart, and conscience.

Since these remarks on Virgil were in the press, Professor Sellar’s work
on Virgil has appeared. If I could have read it before writing the above
pages, I should probably have said more of Virgil’s treatment of Nature,
or less. As it is, I have allowed what I had said to remain unchanged.
Those who wish to see this and every other aspect of Virgil’s poetry
treated in the most thorough and instructive way, will be amply rewarded
by the study of Professor Sellar’s book.



CHAPTER XI.

NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON.


To pass from the Virgilian view of Nature to that of our earliest
English poet, though it brings us nearer our own age in time, is really
to recede from it in feeling to a remote and primitive antiquity. No
poet ever loved Nature more than Chaucer did; but it was with a simple,
unreflective, child-like love. The Morning Star of English Song, as he
has been called, man of the world and skilled in affairs, at home in
courts and with the great, conversant with the ways of all men, high
and low, could turn aside from the gorgeous imagery that filled his
poetic vision, from the profusion of mediæval ceremonies and cavalcade,
of high processions with soldiers in armor, caparisoned horses and
bedizened ladies, from gallant knights with lordly manners, and homely
country-people, from sights and stories fetched from many lands,—to dwell
tenderly on the plain sights and sounds of external nature, and to sing
of them with the transparency and sweetness of a child. It was Nature in
her “first intention,” her most obvious aspects, that attracted him.
Once, indeed, in the “Assembly of Foules,” he speaks of “that noble
Goddesse of Nature.” This, however, is not his usual language, but rather
a conventional way of speaking caught from the Latin poets he had read.
Again, in a more serious strain, the same poem speaks thus:—

    “Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord;”

but it is not on Nature as a great whole, much less as an abstraction,
that his thought usually dwells. It is the outer world in its most
concrete forms and objects, with which he delights to interweave his
poetry—the homely scenes of South England, the oaks and other forest
trees, the green meadows, quiet fields, and comfortable farms, as well
as the great castles where the nobles dwelt. One associates him with
the green lanes and downs of Surrey and Kent, their natural copsewoods
and undulating greenery. I know not that the habitual forms of English
landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever
since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene
and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought
or sentiment. And his favorite season—it is the May-time. Of this he is
never tired of singing. When there comes a really spring-like day in May,
the east wind gone, and the west wind blowing softly, the leaves coming
out, and the birds singing, at such a season one feels instinctively this
is the Chaucer atmosphere and time. One passage has been cited in a
former chapter in which Chaucer speaks of the daisy very lovingly. Other
passages might be cited in which he turns again and again to the same
flower, proving that it was a favorite with one poet before either Burns
or Wordsworth.

Let me give one more passage which gives the characteristic landscape of
Chaucer and his feeling about it:—

    “When shourés sote of rain descended soft,
    Causing the ground felé times and oft
    Up for to give many a wholesome air,
    And every plainé was y-clothed fair

    “With newé green, and maketh smallé flow’rs
    To springen here and there in field and mead
    So very good and wholesome be the show’rs,
    That they renewen that was old and dead
    In winter time, and out of every seed
    Springeth the herbé, so that every wight
    Of this seasón waxeth right glad and light.

    ...

        “Up I rose three hourés after twelfe
    About the springing of the gladsome day,
    And on I put my gear and mine array,
    And to a pleasant grove I ’gan to pass
    Long ere the brighté sun uprisen was;

    “In which were oakés great, straight as a line,
    Under the which the grass so fresh of hue
    Was newly sprung; and an eight foot or nine
    Evéry tree well from his fellow grew,
    With branches broad laden with leavés new,
    That sprungen out against the sunné sheen,
    Some very red, and some a glad light green,

    “Which (as me thought) was a right pleasant sight;
    And eke the birdés songés for to hear
    Would have rejoicéd any earthly wight;
    And I, that could not yet in no mannere
    Hearen the nightingale of all the year,
    Full busily heark’ned with heart and ear.
    If I her voice perceive could anywhere.”

This is exactly the Chaucer landscape. The forest trees are described
each after their kind; even the varieties of color of oak leaves in
spring-time he notes, some coming out “very red,” some of a golden green
hue—a fact not noticed, as far as I remember, by any other poet; the soft
green grass, as soft as velvet under foot, he is never done praising;
the note of each song-bird he knows and delights in. These, with here
and there a quaint old garden described, such is the scenery in which
his human portraits are inlaid. He is altogether one of the most amply
descriptive of English poets till we arrive at quite recent times. And it
is one sign of the permanence and stability of England, even amidst all
change, that among the copsewoods of Kent and the lanes of Surrey just
such scenes may be seen any spring-day now as Chaucer loved to describe
nearly five hundred years ago. This unchanged landscape is everywhere in
his poetry blended with the mediæval manners and costumes that have long
since passed, as a modern poet, in phrase like Chaucer’s own, has well
sung:—

                “He listeneth to the lark,
    Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
    Of painted glass, in leaden lattice bound,
    He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
    Then writeth in a book like any clerk.”


SHAKESPEARE.

The drama is the last form of poetry to which we would turn in hope
of finding rural objects and scenery described. Yet it is astonishing
how much of this kind can be culled from a careful search through
Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed it has been remarked how much of out-of-doors
life there is in Shakespeare’s dramas, how much of the action is carried
on under the open sky. No doubt the pressure of human action and emotion
is too absorbing to admit of detailed description—in most cases of more
than passing allusions. Yet engrossed though he is with stirring events
and thrilling emotions and powerful human characters, it is wonderful how
many are the side-glances that he and his characters cast at the Nature
that surrounds them. And these glances are like everything else in him,
rapid, vivid, and intense. As has been said, natural scenes “he so paints
by occurrences, by allusions, by the emotions of his characters, that we
seem to see them before our eyes, and to live in them.” There is hardly
one of his plays in which the season and the scene is not flashed upon
the mind by a single stroke more vividly than it could be by the most
lengthened description:—

    “Lady! by yonder silver moon I swear,
    That tips with silver all the fruit-tree tops.”

How these few words shed round us all the loveliness of the Italian
night! Or that other where the moonshine of the warm summer night
brightens the last scenes of the “Merchant of Venice,” and calls up,
as only moonlight can, all wild and fascinating memories of legend and
romance:—

    “_Lorenzo._ The moon shines bright: In such a night as this,
                 When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
                 And they did make no noise; in such a night
                 Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
                 And sigh’d his soul toward the Grecian tents,
                 Where Cressid lay that night.

    “_Jessica._                            In such a night
                 Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew;
                 And saw the lion’s shadow ere himself,
                 And ran dismay’d away.

    “_Lorenzo._                     In such a night
                 Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
                 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
                 To come again to Carthage.”

A recent critic has spoken of the Poet-Laureate’s “wonderful skill in
creating a perfectly real and living scene—such as always might, and
perhaps somewhere does, exist in external nature—for the theatre of the
feeling he is about to embody, and yet a scene every feature of which
helps to make the emotion more real and vivid.” Careful students of
Shakespeare know how truly these words apply to almost every one of his
plays. He leaves not only the impression of each character deeply graven
on your memory; but the season and the scenery which encompassed them,
though perhaps not above a line or two are given to them, rise before us
almost as indelibly. To take one sample out of many. In “Macbeth,” for
instance, how does the scenery at every turn answer to the action and the
emotion! For the first appearance of the witches there is the blasted
heath, the thunder and lightning; then, as the key-note to Lady Macbeth’s
fell purpose, there is—

          “The raven himself is hoarse
    That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
    Under my battlements.”

But when King Duncan himself, with his retinue, appears, the whole aspect
of things is changed, and the gracious disposition of the old king comes
out very naturally in the view he takes of the castle in which he was so
soon to meet his doom:—

    “This castle has a pleasant seat; the air
    Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
    Unto our gentle senses.”

Banquo replies:—

                    “This guest of summer,
    The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
    By his loved mansionry that the heaven’s breath
    Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
    Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
    Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
    Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
    The air is delicate.”

The castle, with its buttresses and battlements, its high gables and
overhanging towers, lends itself as readily to the pleasant humor of the
kindly king that calm afternoon, as it will do to the horror and the
gloom of the morrow. Then the night in which the murder was done is
quite such a night as often comes in dead winter, yet fits in so well
with the deed and the feeling it awakened in men’s hearts.

    “_Lennox._ The night has been unruly: where we lay
             Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
             Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death
             And other prodigies.

    _Macb._ ’Twas a rough night.

    _Len._   My young remembrance cannot parallel
             A fellow to it.”

This is the talk that passes just before the murder is known. And after
it is known, this is the kind of day that follows:

                “By the clock, ’tis day,
    And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.”

Again, as twilight brings on, the night which is to see Banquo taken out
of the way, Macbeth exclaims—

                “Come, seeling night,
    Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
    And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,
    Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond
    Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens, and the crow
    Makes wing to the rooky wood;
    Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
    While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.”

But why go on quoting passages, which all remember, to show how exactly
all through this or the other dramas the face of Nature answers to the
deeds and the emotions of the human agents, and how a line—sometimes a
word in the midst of a rapid dialogue—lets in the open air, and all
the surrounding nature, more tellingly than pages of description could
have done. But between Shakespeare and a modern poet there is this great
difference, that, while in the latter this correspondence is attained
by careful study and elaborate forethought, in Shakespeare we may well
believe that the white heat of imagination which created and moulded the
characters in all their throng of emotion struck off, at the same moment,
almost unconsciously, the aspects of external nature which were proper to
them.

The forest was evidently with Shakespeare a favorite resort, bringing
back to him, as it would, recollections of his youthful deer-huntings.
In his day the forest was not far off or strange, but still a familiar
place, as we are told, coming up very close to the gates of the country
town. From Stratford-on-Avon he had not far to go before he found himself
in the midst of the forest of fine oaks, the survivors of which are still
seen all about in the parks and lanes of Warwickshire. So when he would
spend the summer night in the most extravagant mirth and drollery, it is
out to the wild wood that he leads his company; when he would surround
the grave thoughts of the exiled Duke and the melancholy of Jaques with a
congenial background, he places them in the Forest of Arden, where free
Nature fits into the mood, and brings soothing to their mental maladies.

    “Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
    Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
    More free from peril than the envious court?”

In how many ways throughout these plays are the aspects of human life set
forth by their resemblances in Nature!

    “_Jul._ The current that with gentle murmur glides,
            Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage;
            But, when his fair course is not hindered,
            He makes sweet music with the enameled stones,
            Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
            He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;
            And so by many winding nooks he strays
            With willing sport, to the wild ocean.
            Then let me go, and hinder not my course,
            I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream,
            And make my pastime of each weary step,
            Till the last step have brought me to my love;
            And then I’ll rest, as, after much turmoil,
            A blessed soul doth in Elysium.”

Shakespeare, whether from watching the sea from the shore, or from
sailing on it, was evidently at home in describing it.

The sea storm in “Pericles” (Act iii. Scene 1) is full of life and
movement, made all the more terrible by the death of the queen on
shipboard when the tempest is at its height. They are off the coast of
Tharsus, and the ship is driving in upon it unmanageably, and will not
answer to the helm:—

    “_1st Sailor._—Slack the bolins there; thou wilt not, wilt
    thou? Blow and split thyself.

    _2d Sailor._—But sea room, an the brine and cloudy billow
    kiss the moon, I care not.

    _1st Sailor._—Sir, your queen must overboard; the sea works
    high, the wind is loud, and will not lie till the ship be cleared of
    the dead.”

The human situation and the conflict of the elements combine each
to heighten to the utmost the terror and despair of the other. The
conjunction is no doubt finely imagined. But when a modern poet writes:
“No poetry of shipwreck and the sea has ever equaled the great scene of
‘Pericles,’ no such note of music was ever struck out of the clash and
contention of tempestuous elements,” one cannot but feel that he indulges
in exaggeration.

For coast scenery the description of Dover cliffs stands almost alone.

But while with the forest and the sea-coast Shakespeare’s early life
had made him familiar, he had not, as far as we know, had much, if any,
experience of mountains. Of Nature, as of man, he painted for the most
part what he had seen and known—idealizing it of course, but having
caught the first hint from reality. And mountains formed no part of the
Warwickshire or indeed of the England which he knew. Therefore while we
find many notices of the fields, the forest, and the sea, and of the way
they affect human imaginations, there is no allusion to the effect of
mountain scenery. It could not have been said of him:—

    “The power of hills is on thee.”

On this fact Mr Ruskin has this characteristic reflection, that
Shakespeare having been ordained to take a full view of total human
nature, to be perfectly equal and universal in his portraiture of man,
could be allowed no mountains, nor even supreme natural beauty. For had
he been reared among mountains they would have overbalanced him, have
laid too powerful a grasp on his imagination, have made him lean too much
their way, and so would have marred his universality. Whether we take
this view of it or not, it is certain that the power of the mountains
is not expressed in that poetry which expresses almost every other
conceivable thing, and that the mountain rapture had to lie dumb for two
more centuries before it found utterance in English song.

In “Cymbeline” the two noble youths are brought up in caves among the
mountains, but from this their characters receive no touch of freedom or
grandeur, but are enhanced only by having taken no taint of degradation
from so base a dwelling-place. “The only thing belonging to the hills,”
says Mr. Ruskin, “that Shakespeare seems to feel as noble, was the
pine-tree, and that was because he had seen in Warwickshire clumps of
pine occasionally rising on little sandstone mounds above the lowland
woods.” He touches on this tree fondly again and again.

                                  “As rough
    Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,
    That by his top doth take the mountain pine,
    And make him stoop to the vale.”

Again:—

    “You may as well forbid the mountain pines
    To wave their high tops, and to make no noise
    When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven.”

And again:—

    “But when from under this terrestrial bank
    He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines.”

He knew little then of the mountains by experience; but had he known them
more, though they might have added some sternness to his genius, some awe
to his thoughts about life, they might perhaps have narrowed his range
and made his view of men less universal and serene. So Mr. Ruskin thinks.
And yet perhaps it is hardly safe so to speculate about Shakespeare. For
could not the mind which took in and harmonized so many things, have made
room for this other influence, without deranging its proportions and
marring its universality?

Though Shakespeare sometimes describes, in a general way, countries
he had never seen, as in that exquisite description of Sicily in the
“Winter’s Tale,”—

    “The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet,
    Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing
    The common praise it bears”—

yet whenever he descends to details of country life and scenery, as he
so often does, every word bears the stamp of having been brought, not
from books, but from what his own eyes had seen in the neighborhood of
Stratford-upon-Avon. How familiar he was with the garden and all its
processes is seen by many a metaphor and allusion, perhaps nowhere more
notably than in the 4th Scene of the 3d Act of “Richard II.,” where in
the Duke of York’s garden at Langley the discourse of the gardener and
his men on the management of fruit-trees is turned to political meaning.
A disordered state is a neglected and unweeded garden, the pruning and
bleeding of fruit-trees are the restraining great and growing men in the
state, and all the operations are so described and applied as only an
adept in gardening could do; or again, there is the well-known metaphor
in Wolsey’s speech where he likens his blushing honors to blossoms nipt
by frost. The process of grafting furnishes many a metaphor for human
doings. All the ordinary forest trees, the oak, the elm, the pine, the
willow, come in with the easy handling of one who knew them from boyhood.
Every bird, the rook, the chough, the throstle, the ousel-cock or
blackbird, the nightingale,

    “The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
    The plain-song cuckoo gray”—

all find familiar notice; and perhaps of these we might select the lark
as his favorite, to judge by the frequency of allusion to it.

Though garden flowers—such garden flowers as were cultivated in his
time—are not passed over, yet much more noteworthy is the loving way in
which Shakespeare dwells, or rather makes his characters dwell, on the
field-flowers. Almost every wild-flower that is to be found at this day
in the meadows and woods by Avon side looks out from some part of other
of his poetry. But this love for flowers, it has been noted, he puts in
the mouth, not of his strong heroic characters, his Henry V. or Othello,
but in the lips of his more feminine ones. It is the sentimental Duke in
“Twelfth Night” who exclaims—

    “That strain again; it had a dying fall.
    Oh! it came o’er my ear like the sweet south,
    That breathes upon a bank of violets,
    Stealing, and giving odor”—

just such a bank as may be seen any April day under the Warwickshire
hedge-rows. Every one remembers poor Ophelia and her flowers, the flowers
with which Arviragus promises to sweeten the sad grave of Fidele; and,
above all, the wonderful scene in the “Winter’s Tale” where Perdita
presiding at the sheep-shearing feast sorts the flowers according to the
age of the guests, “flowers of winter, rosemary and rue,” to the elders,
to men of middle age flowers of middle summer—

    “Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,
    The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,
    And with him rises weeping.”

And for her fairest friend—

    “I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might
    Become your time of day;
    Daffodils, violets, and pale primroses.”

Lastly, the song which winds up “Love’s Labor Lost,”—with what lyric
sweetness it condenses how much of flowery spring and of nipping winter
into a few easy lines! In this as in all other mentions of wild-flowers
in Shakespeare, it has been remarked how true he is to time and season,
giving to each flower its proper season and haunt, and sorting them
all with the careless ease of one to whom they were among the most
familiar things. In this he contrasts with the artistic but not accurate
assortment of flowers in the well-known passage of “Lycidas,” where
Milton groups in one posy flowers belonging to different seasons.

On the whole, though Shakespeare never set himself formally to study or
describe external Nature, yet his dramas are full of her presence and her
works—not taken from books or daintily tricked out by art, but idealized
from his memory well stored with country scenes. Again, these are given,
not in elaborate descriptions, but in rapid strokes, and side-glances,
vivid, penetrating, intense, thrown off from the heat of an imagination
brooding mainly over human interests and emotions. And perhaps after all
that view of Nature is the truest, healthiest, manliest, which does not
pore or moralize over her appearances, but keeps them in the background,
putting man into the foreground and making him the central object. As Man
and Nature stand over against each other, and are evidently made each
for each, it may be that not apart from Man, with his emotions and his
destiny, can Nature be rightly conceived and portrayed.


MILTON.

When we pass from the images of Nature that abound in Chaucer and in
Shakespeare to those which Milton furnishes, the transition is much the
same as when we pass from the scenery of Homer to that of Virgil. The
contrast is that between natural free-flowing poetry, in which the beauty
is child-like and unconscious, and highly cultured artistic poetry, which
produces its effects through a medium of learned illustration, ornate
coloring, and stately diction. In the one case Nature is seen directly
and at first hand, with nothing between the poet and the object except
the imaginative emotion under which he works. In the other, Nature
is apprehended only in her “second intention,” as logicians speak,
only as she appears through a beautiful haze, compounded of learning,
associations of the past, and carefully selected artistic colors. With
Milton, Nature was not his first love, but held only a secondary place in
his affections. He was in the first place a scholar, a man of letters,
with the theologian and polemic latent in him. A lover of all artistic
beauty he was, no doubt, and of Nature mainly as it lends itself to
this perception. And as is his mode of apprehending Nature, such is the
language in which he describes her. When he reached his full maturity
he had framed for himself out of the richness of his genius and the
resources of his learning a style elaborate and splendid, so that he
stands unique among English poets, “our one first-rate master in the
grand style.” As an eminent living French writer says,—“For rendering
things he has the unique word, the word which is a discovery,” and
“he has not only the image and the word, he has the period also, the
large musical phrase, somewhat laden with ornaments and intricate with
inversions, but bearing all along with it in its superb undulation. Above
all, he has something indescribably serene and victorious, an unfailing
level of style, power indomitable.” This admirable description of M.
Scherer applies mainly to Milton’s style, as it was fully elaborated
in his great epic. And the thought has sometimes occurred, whether
this magnificently elaborated style can be a fit vehicle for rendering
truly the simplicity, the refreshingness of Nature,—whether the poet’s
art, from its very opulence, must not color too much the clearness and
transparency of the external world. However this may be, it is certain
that it is not to his maturer poems, with their grandeur of style, that
we look for his most vivid renderings of scenery, but to those early
poems, which had more native grace of diction and less of artistic
elaboration. Nowhere has Milton shown such an eye for scenery as in
those first poems, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” and “Comus,”
composed before he was thirty, just after leaving Cambridge, while he
was living under his father’s roof at Horton, in Buckinghamshire.
During the five years of country life, the most genial of all his
years, amid his incessant study of the Greek and Latin poets, and other
self-improvement, his heart was perhaps more open than at any other time
to the rural beauty which lay around him. “Comus” and “Lycidas” both
contain fine natural imagery, yet somewhat deflected by the artistic
framework in which it is set. In the latter poem, in which Milton,
adapting the idyllic form of Virgil, fills it with a mightier power,
classical allusion and mythology are strangely, yet not unharmoniously,
blended with pictures taken from English landscape. Every one remembers
the splendid grouping of flowers which he there broiders in. Of this
catalogue it has been observed that, beautiful as it is, it violates the
truth of nature, as it places side by side flowers of different seasons
which are never seen flowering together. It is in his two “descriptive
Lyrics” that we find the clearest proofs of an eye that had observed
Nature at first hand and for itself. In the poem descriptive of mirth,
it has been observed that the mirth is of a very sedate kind, not
reaching beyond a “trim and stately cheerfulness.” The mythological
pedigrees attached both to mirth and to melancholy strike us now as
somewhat strange, if not frigid; but, with this allowance, Milton’s
richly sensuous imagination bodies forth the cheerfulness, as he wished
to portray it, in a succession of images unsurpassed for beauty. In the
lines descriptive of these images, Art and Nature appear perhaps more
than in any other of Milton’s poems in perfect equipoise. The images
selected are the aptest vehicles of the sentiment; the language in which
they are expressed is of the most graceful and musical; while the natural
objects themselves are seen at first hand, set down with their edges
still sharp, and uncolored by any tinge of bookish allusion. Aspects of
English scenery, one after another, occur, which he was the first poet to
note, and which none since could dare to touch, so entirely has he made
them his own. The mower whetting his scythe,—who ever hears that sound
coming from the lawn in the morning without thinking of Milton? “The
tanned haycock in the mead;” the cottage chimney smoking betwixt two aged
oaks; the moon

              “As if her head she bowed,
    Stooping through a fleecy cloud;”

the shower pattering

            “On the ruffling leaves,
    With minute drops from off the eaves;”

the great curfew-bell heard swinging “over some wide watered
shore;”—these are all images taken straight from English landscape which
Milton has forever enshrined in his two matchless poems.

Of these two poems, describing the bright and the thoughtful aspects of
Nature, my friend Mr. Palgrave, in his exquisite collection of English
Lyrics, “The Golden Treasury,” has observed that these are the earliest
pure descriptive lyrics in our language, adding that it is a striking
proof of Milton’s astonishing power that these are still the best, in a
style which so many great poets have since his time attempted.

When, after a poetic silence of nearly thirty years, Milton, old, blind,
and fallen, as he thought, on evil days, addressed himself again to
poetry, in his two Epics, and in his Classic Drama, he gave vent to all
that was lofty and sublime in his severe nature, but he returned no more
to rural description. Immense scholarship, experience of men and of
affairs, ripe meditation on things human and divine,—all these he brought
to his later work; but the simple love of Nature, such as it was in his
earlier poems, has disappeared, or is overlaid by his learning.[15] The
description of the garden of Eden, in the fourth book of “Paradise Lost,”
is magnificent, but vague. The pomp of language and profusion of images
leaves on the imagination no definite picture. You have, it is true,
“in narrow room Nature’s whole wealth,” but it does not satisfy, as
many a humbler but real scene described with a few strokes satisfies.
Such landscapes in poetry, entirely projected by the imagination and
answering to no scene on earth, are, like the composition pictures,
which some painters delight in, only splendid failures.

There is, however, another use made of Nature in those later poems, which
may be called the geographical use of it, in which Milton has no rival.
His vast reading enabled him to bring together similes and illustrations
from every land—from China, India, Tartary, Cape of Good Hope; nor from
these only, but from old Rome, Greece, Syria, Babylon. Such images from
many lands, so rich, varied, and grandly worded, form one of the most
permanent attractions of “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.” The
one real inspired creation of scenery, if scenery it can be called,
which “Paradise Lost” contains, is the description of Hell. The primeval
elements of the world are drawn upon, the unmeasurable abyss of fire,
the frozen cataract, every thing vast that is to be found on earth is
here. From things of earth too are drawn the images that set forth the
appearance of the inhabitants—the fallen angels like scathed oaks or
pines on a blasted heath—Satan himself like leviathan “slumbering on the
Norway foam,” and many another image from Nature taken to shadow forth
things supernatural or infernal.

But if we wish to find in Milton the pure breath of the country, the
fragrance of the fields, it is to his early poems we must return. In
these, scholar and man of letters though he was, learning and art had
not excluded Nature, but with his eye still resting on actual sights of
the country, he describes them with a native lightness and grace which
his classic style only makes more expressive. During the life of Milton,
other though lesser poets had given expression to the love of Nature.
Such were William Browne, author of “Britannia’s Pastorals,” and Andrew
Marvell, whose “Poems in the Country” contain here and there graceful
expression of rural things.

But after Milton died (1674), rural life and Nature, for more than half a
century, disappeared from English poetry.



CHAPTER XII.

RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON.


The divorce from Nature and country life which marked the Poetry of the
closing seventeenth and opening eighteenth centuries, has often been
subject of comment, and need not detain us now. Whatever the causes of
this divorce may have been, it is beside our present purpose to inquire
into them. Enough to note the fact that during the latter part of Charles
II.’s reign, and during the succeeding reigns of William, Queen Anne, and
the first George, poetry retired from the fields, and confined herself
to the streets of London. If she ever ventured into the country at all,
she did not wander beyond the Twickenham villa or Richmond Hill. While
first Dryden and then Pope were in the ascendant, the subjects of poetry
were those to be found in city life and in social man. Nature, Passion,
Imagination, as has been said, were dismissed; politics, party spirit and
argument, wit and satire, criticism and scientific inquiry, took their
place.

When after this long absence Poetry once more left the suburbs and
wandered back to the fields, she took with her this great gain,—the
power to describe the things of nature in a correcter diction and more
beautiful style than England had before known, save only in Milton’s
descriptive lyrics. It was in the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay that the
sense of natural beauty first reappeared. Since his day Nature, which,
even when felt and described in earlier English poetry, had held a place
altogether subordinate to man, has more and more claimed to be regarded
in poetry as almost coequal with man. Ramsay, whose “Gentle Shepherd” was
first published in 1725, drew his inspiration in large measure from the
songs and ballads of his native country, which, while full of the pathos
of human incident and affection, are hardly less sensitive to the looks
of earth and sky, whether stern or lovely. It was from his knowledge
of rustic life and his love of the popular song that his inspiration
was drawn. But his genuine and natural instincts were overlaid by some
knowledge and relish of the artificial literature of his age. The result
is a kind of composite poetry, in which Scotch manners, feeling, and
language are strangely intermingled with a sort of Arcadian veneer,
brought from the Eclogues of Virgil, or from English imitations of these.
This is most seen in Ramsay’s songs, where, instead of preserving the
precious old melodies, he has replaced them by insipid counterfeits
of his own, in which Jock and Jenny are displaced by Damon and Chloe.
Though some traces of false taste do crop out here and there, even in
the dialogue of the “The Gentle Shepherd,” yet these are far fewer than
in the songs. The feelings of our age may be now and then offended by a
freedom of speech that borders on coarseness, but that the texture of the
poem is stirring and human-hearted is proved by the hold it still retains
on the Scottish peasantry. If here and there a false note mars the truth
of the human manners, as when Scotch Lowland shepherds talk of playing on
reeds and flutes, the scenery of “The Gentle Shepherd” is true to Nature
as it is among the Pentland Hills:—

    “Gae farder up the burn to Habbie’s How,
    Where a’ the sweets o’ spring and summer grow:
    Between twa birks, out o’er a little linn
    The water fa’s an’ mak’s a singin’ din;
    A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,
    Kisses, wi’ easy whirls, the bordering grass.
    We’ll end our washing while the morning’s cool.
    And when the day grows het we’ll to the pool,
    There wash oursels—it’s healthfu’ now in May,
    And sweetly cauler on so warm a day.”

A pool in a burn among the Lowland hills could hardly be more naturally
described.

Again, one of the shepherds thus invites his love—

    “To where the saugh-tree shades the mennin-pool,
    I’ll frae the hill come doun, when day grows cool.
    —Keep tryst, and meet me there.”

The alder-tree shading the minnow pool—there is a real piece of Lowland
scenery brought from the outer world for the first time into poetry.
These are but a few samples of the scenery of Scottish rural life with
which “The Gentle Shepherd” abounds. Burns, who lived in the generation
that followed Ramsay, and always looks back to him as one of his chief
forerunners and masters in the poetic art, fixes on Ramsay’s delineations
of Nature as one of his chief characteristics. Burns asks, Is there none
of the moderns who will rival the Greeks in pastoral poetry?—

    “Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan—
    There’s ane; come forrit, honest Allan!
    Thou need na jouk behint the hallan,
                  A chiel sae clever;
    The teeth o’ Time may gnaw Tantallan,
                  But thou’s forever!

    “Thou paints auld Nature to the nines,
    In thy sweet Caledonian lines;
    Nae gowden stream thro’ myrtles twines,
                  Where Philomel,
    While nightly breezes sweep the vines,
                  Her griefs will tell!

    “In gowany glens thy burnie strays,
    Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes;
    Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes
                  Wi’ hawthorns gray,
    Where blackbirds join the shepherd’s lays
                  At close o’ day.”

It may well be that when we turn to Scottish poetry the burns and braes
should sing and shine through almost every song. For there is no feature
in which Scottish scenery more differs from English than in the clear and
living northern burns, compared with the dead drumlie ditches called
brooks in the Midland Counties.


THOMSON.

The return to Nature, begun by Ramsay in his “Gentle Shepherd,” was
carried on by another Scot, though hardly a Scottish poet—Thomson, who a
few years later (1728-30) published his poem of “The Seasons.” In this
work, descriptive of scenery and country life through the four seasons,
Thomson, it is alleged, was but working in a vein which was native to
Scottish poets from the earliest time. Two centuries before, Gawain
Douglas, in the prologues to his translation of the Æneid, abounds in
description of rural things. I should hardly venture to say it myself, in
case it might seem national prejudice, but a writer who is not a Scot,
Mr. S. Brooke, has remarked that there is “a passionate, close, poetical
observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the
earliest times, such as we do not possess in English poetry till the time
of Wordsworth.” In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute
loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been
working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in
him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in
the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of
his poem, is there much savor of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank
verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject.
It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, over-loaded with epithets, full
of artificial invocations, “personified abstractions,” and insipid
classicalities. It is a composite style of language formed from the
recollection partly of Milton, partly of Virgil’s Georgics.

Yet in spite of all these obstructions which repel pure taste and natural
feeling, no one can read the four books of the “Seasons” through, without
seeing that Thomson, for all his false style, wrote with his eye upon
Nature, and laid his finger on many a fact and image never before touched
in poetry. In the first few lines of “Spring” he notes how, at its
approach, the plover and other birds which have wintered by the sea leave
the shores and set far inland to their summer haunts in moors and hills.
Whilst the season is still hanging uncertain between winter and spring,
he notes how

                                  “Scarce
    The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulfed
    To shake the sounding marsh; or, from the shore,
    The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
    And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.”

How true to nature this picture! how happily rendered! Then you have the
plowman and his oxen beginning their work—

    “Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.”

Again,—

    “From the moist meadow to the withered hill,
    Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs.”

That “withered hill!” Who that has ever looked on the mountains in
March, just before the first finger of Spring has touched them, but will
recognize the appropriateness of that epithet for their wan, bleached,
decayed aspect!

Then you have the whole process of trout-fishing, in the “mossy-tinctured
stream,” where “the dark brown water aids the grilse,” showing that, as
Thomson wrote, his thoughts reverted from Richmond to the streams of the
Merse; you have also the song-birds piping each from its proper haunt,
the linnet from “the flowering furze,”—the various places where each bird
builds his nest, given with an accuracy that every bird-nesting boy will
recognize; and the scent of the bean-fields, noticed for the first time,
as far as I know, in poetry.

As one longer example of Thomson’s close observation and peculiar manner,
take the description of a spring shower:—

                                      “At last
    The clouds consign their treasures to the fields,
    And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool
    Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
    In large effusion o’er the freshened world;
    The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard
    By such as wander through the forest walks,
    Beneath the umbrageous multitude of leaves.

    ...

    “Thus all day long the full-distended clouds
    Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth
    Is deep enriched with vegetable life;
    Till in the western sky the downward sun
    Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
    Of broken clouds, gay shifting to his beam,
    The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes
    The illumined mountain; through the forest streams;
    Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,
    Far smoking o’er the interminable plain,
    In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
    Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
    Full swell the woods, their every music wakes,
    Mixed in wild concert, with the warbling brooks
    Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
    And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
    Whence, blending all, the sweetened zephyr springs.”

These are but a few samples from “Spring” showing the minute faithfulness
with which Thomson had observed

    “The negligence of Nature, wide and wild.”

Here are appearances of Nature, each accurately observed, and their
succession truthfully rendered, but the whole is so overlaid with tawdry
diction that it is hard to pierce below the enamel and feel the true
pulse of Nature beating under it. And yet it does beat there, and in many
another description in the “Seasons” now little heeded, because of their
old-fashioned garb. And yet he who will read the “Seasons” through will
find many a phrase true to Nature, many a felicitous expression cropping
out from the even roll of his solemn pompous monotone. Thomson has been
called the Claude of poets. And his way of handling Nature stands to
that of Wordsworth or Tennyson much as Claude’s landscapes do to those
of Turner or some of the other modern painters. It may be added that
Thomson’s somewhat vapid digressions about Amelia and Lavinia have not
more meaning than the conventional lay figures and the classic temples
which Claude introduces into the foreground of his landscapes.

As to the sentiment which animates the “Seasons,” it is a revolt from
the life of town and court to the simplicity and truth of rural life and
feeling. It is almost the first time this revolt finds expression in
English poetry, if we except some of the sylvan scenes in Shakespeare.
As the French critic well says, “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson
had expressed all Rousseau’s sentiments, almost in the same style. Like
him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him he
contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries
and corruption. Like him he exalted deep love, conjugal tenderness, the
union of souls, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he
combated contemporary frivolity and compared the ancient republics with
modern states. Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty,
virtue; rose from the spectacle of Nature to the contemplation of God....
Like him, too, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of
his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing,
and by an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous
invocations, and oratorical tirades.” This passage gives truly, if with
some exaggeration, the spirit with which the “Seasons” and all their
outward imagery are informed. But while Thomson watched the ever-changing
appearances and recorded them, what, it may be asked, was his thought
about the Power which originates and upholds them? what did he conceive
to be the relation of the things we see to the things we do not see?
Everywhere his poem breathes a spirit of naturalistic piety. But if there
is nothing in the “Seasons” inconsistent with Christian truth, there is
little or nothing that directly affirms it. In “Winter” he breathes this
prayer—

    “Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
    Oh teach me what is good! teach me thyself!
    Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
    From every low pursuit! and feed my soul
    With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
    Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!”

There is nothing in his amiable and placid life to throw doubt on the
sincerity of that prayer. And yet Thomson’s piety seems to us now of that
kind which is easily satisfied and thoughtlessly thankful!

There are many at the present day, and those the most thoughtful, who
“not only see through but (as has been said) feel a strong revulsion
against the well-meant but superficial attempt to describe the world as
happy, and to see in God, as the Governor of it, only a sort of easy and
shallow goodness.” They cannot be satisfied with such a view. “They have
a complaining within—a sense of imperfection in and around them which
rebels against so easy-going a view and demands another solution. It is
not merely a benevolent God that they long for, but a God who sympathizes
with man, and who in some way, of which only revelation can fully inform
us, makes out of man’s misery and imperfection the way to something
better for him.”

Thomson’s religion, no doubt, could hardly have escaped the infection
of the Deism that was all around him in the literary and philosophic
atmosphere of his time. In his beautiful “Hymn,” which may be regarded
as the climax of the “Seasons,” and as summing up the devoutest thoughts
which these suggested to him, there is nothing that goes beyond such a
view:—

    “These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
    Are but the varied God. The rolling year
    Is full of thee”—

unless perhaps in that more Christian strain where, hearing the bleating
on the hills and the lowings in the vale, he breaks forth—

                      “For the Great Shepherd reigns,
    And his unsuffering Kingdom yet will come.”

The prevailing spirit of the Hymn, as of most of his other addresses to
the Deity, is that of optimism and the reign of universal benevolence:—

                              “I cannot go
    Where Universal Love smiles not around,
    Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns,
    From seeming evil still educing good.”

There is much benevolence in his poetry, much feeling for the miseries
and wrongs of mankind, but no perception of that deeper mystery—that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for a
deliverance. Neither is there any sense of the relation of the creation
to the Creator other than that which the somewhat mechanical conception
of a maker and a machine supply. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that
Thomson does not seem to feel the inadequacy of this conception, for we
in our own day, who have got to feel so profoundly its inadequacy, have
not as yet gone far to supply its place with a worthier. Yet whatever
may be his shortcomings, all honor to the poet of the “Seasons”! Genuine
lover of the country as he was, he was the first English poet who led
poetry back into the fields, and made her once more free of her own
native region.



CHAPTER XIII.

NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, AND BURNS.


COLLINS.

When Thomson was laid in Richmond Church, another poet chanted over him a
dirge breathing the very pathos of Nature herself:—

    “In yonder grave a Druid lies,
      Where slowly winds the stealing wave,
    The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise
      To deck its poet’s sylvan grave.

    “Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
      When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
    And oft suspend the dashing oar
      To bid his gentle spirit rest.”

About that ode of the gentle and pensive Collins (born 1721, died 1759)
there is a sweet pathetic tone which the grander strains of later English
poetry have never surpassed. In the “Dirge over Fidele” the same strain
of pensive beauty is renewed. Collins was the first poet since Milton
wrote his early lyrics who brought to the description of rural things
that perfection of style, that combined simplicity and beauty, which
Milton had learned from the classic poets There is another poem of
Collins’s which, if not so perfect in expression as the two just named,
is interesting as almost the earliest inroad by an English poet into the
wild and romantic world which the Highlands of Scotland contain, unless
we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” This is Collins’s ode on the “Popular
Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland.” It seems that in the autumn
of 1749, Home, the author of the tragedy of “Douglas,” had, when on a
visit to London, during his brief stay made the acquaintance of Collins,
and kindled his imagination with tales of the Highlands and the Hebrides.
Collins seems to have deepened this interest by the perusal of Martin’s
curious book on the Western Isles, and on Home’s return to Scotland
Collins addressed to him the ode, in which the English poet entered with
a deeper, more imaginative insight into the weird and wild superstitions
of the Gael than any Scottish poet had as yet shown. After describing
with great force and truthfulness the second sight, the wraith, the
water-kelpie, and many such-like things, he closes with this apostrophe:—

    “All hail! ye scenes that o’er my soul prevail!
    Ye splendid friths and lakes, which, far away,
    Are by smooth Annan filled, or pastoral Tay,
    Or Don’s romantic springs, at distance hail!
    The time shall come, when I, perhaps, may tread
    Your lowly glens, o’erhung with spreading broom;
    Or, o’er your stretching heaths, by fancy led;
    Or, o’er your mountains creep, in awful gloom.”

Poor Collins: this hope was never fulfilled. A deeper gloom than any
that rests on the Highland mountains too soon gathered over him. The ode
itself does not seem to have received the notice it deserves, both for
its own excellence and as the first symptom of a new and enlarged feeling
about Nature entering into English poetry. In the above extract the word
“glen” occurs. Is there any earlier instance of its use in English poetry
or prose? The Scottish poets, except the ballad-writers, were afraid to
use it till the time of Scott. Macpherson in his translations of Ossian,
twelve years later than this ode, uniformly renders the Gaelic “gleann”
by the insipid “vale.”

But the most perfect and original poem of Collins, as well as the most
finely appreciative of Nature, is his Ode to Evening. No doubt evening is
personified in his address as “maid composed,” and “calm votaress,” but
the personification is so delicately handled, and in so subdued a tone,
that it does not jar on the feelings, as such personifications too often
do:—

    “If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
    May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
            Like thy own solemn springs,
            Thy springs and dying gales,

    “O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
    Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
            With brede ethereal wove,
            O’erhang his wavy bed:

    “Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
    With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
            Or where the beetle winds
            His small but sullen horn,

    “As oft he rises ’midst the twilight path,
    Against the pilgrim borne in needless hum
            Now teach me, maid composed,
            To breathe some softened strain.

    ...

    “Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake
    Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,
            Or upland fallows gray
            Reflect its last cool gleam.

    “But when chill, blustering winds, or driving rain,
    Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,
            That from the mountain’s side,
            Views wilds, and swelling floods,

    “And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires,
    And hears the simple bell, and marks o’er all,
            Thy dewy finger draw
            The gradual dusky veil.”

There is about the whole ode a subdued twilight tone, a remoteness
from men and human things, and a pensive evening musing, all the more
expressive, because it does not shape itself into definite thoughts,
but reposes in appropriate images. And, as the Aldine biographer
observes,—“The absence of rhyme leaves the even flow of the verse
unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as
if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contributes to the
effect.”

In Thomson there was probably an observation of the facts of Nature
wider and more varied, but in Collins there is an intermingling of human
feeling with Nature’s aspects which is at once more delicate and deep.

The increased sensibility to Nature which in English poetry appeared in
Thomson, was carried on through the eighteenth century to its close by
Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and manifested itself in each of
these poets in a way characteristic of himself.


GRAY.

In Collins we have seen Nature described with a perfect grace of language
and a penetrating of the forms and colors of things with human sentiment,
that far outwent the minute and faithful descriptions of Thomson. This
same movement was maintained, I cannot say advanced, by Gray. That he
had a fine feeling for Nature is apparent in his letters, which show
more minute observation and greater descriptive power than his poetry.
In these the beautiful scenery around the Westmoreland Lakes finds the
earliest notice.

In dealing with scenery, as with other things, Nature without Art, and
Art without Nature, are alike inadequate. To hit the balance is no easy
task. To let in Nature fully upon the heart, by means of an art which is
colorless and unperceived—this English poetry was struggling toward, and
Gray helped it forward, though he himself only attained partial success.
Often the art is too apparent; a false classicism is sometimes thrust in
between the reader and the fresh outer world. Wordsworth has laid hold
of a sonnet of Gray’s as a text to preach against false poetic diction.
And yet Gray, notwithstanding his often too elaborate diction, deserves
better of lovers of English poetry than to have his single sonnet thus
gibbeted, merely because, instead of saying the sun rises, it makes

    “Reddening Phœbus lift his golden fire.”

In the ode on Spring, it is “the rosy-bosomed hours, fair Venus’ train,”
which bring spring in. Venus is thrust between you and the advent of
spring, much as Adversity is made “the daughter of Jove.” For the
nightingale we have “the Attic warbler,” as in another ode, for the
yellow corn-fields we have “Ceres’ golden reign.” It is needless to say
how abhorrent this sort of stuff is to the modern feeling about Nature.
And yet, notwithstanding these blemishes, Gray did help forward the
movement to a more perfect and adequate style, in which Nature should
come direct to the heart, through a perfectly transparent medium of art.
When he is at his best, as in the Elegy, Nature and human feeling so
perfectly combine that the mind finds in all the images satisfaction and
relief. There is in the Elegy no image from Greece or Rome, no intrusive
heathen deity, to jar upon the feeling. From the common English landscape
alone is drawn all that is needed to minister to the quiet but deep
pathos of the whole.

The line of poets who carried on the description of Nature during the
last century, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, much as they differ,
have this in common. Their style, though each had his own, was in all
formed by a more or less intimate study of the classic poets. And they
regarded Nature, all more or less, in a meditative moralizing way. They
were all thoughtful, cultivated men, with convictions and sentiments of
their own—sentiments mainly of a grave cast,—they saw Nature through the
light of these sentiments, and sought out those scenes and images in
Nature which suited their habitual mood. None of them are born children
of Nature, knowing her face before they could read or write. They were
lovers of books before they became lovers of the country. Hence there is
in them no rapture in the presence of Nature. For that we shall have to
look elsewhere than to those scholarly gentlemen.


GOLDSMITH.

The amiable and versatile Goldsmith looks at Nature, as he passes along,
with a less moralizing eye than the sombre-minded Gray. In his earliest
long poem, “The Traveller,” published in 1765, though he surveys many
lands, his eye dwells on man and society rather than on the outward
world. In remarkable contrast to more recent English poets, though
he passes beneath the shadow of the Alps, he looks up to them with
shuddering horror rather than with any kindling of soul. The mountain
glory had not yet burst on the souls of men. The one thought that strikes
him is the hard lot of the mountaineers. Such conventional lines as these
are all that he has for the mountains themselves:—

    “No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
    But winter lingers in the lap of May;
    No zephyr fondly sues the mountain’s breast,
    But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.”

It is only when he thinks of the Switzer’s love for them that they become
interesting:—

    “Dear is the shed to which his soul conforms,
    And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms;
    And as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
    Clings close and closer to his mother’s breast,
    So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind’s roar,
    But bind him to his native mountains more.”

This poem, however, is remarkable as the first expression in English
verse of that personal interest in foreign scenes and people which has
kindled so many a splendid strain of our more recent poetry. But it is
in “The Deserted Village,” his best known poem, that he has most fully
shown the grace and truthfulness with which he could touch natural
scenes. Lissoy, an Irish village where the poet’s brother had a living,
is said to have been the original from which he drew. In the poem, the
church which crowns the neighboring hill, the mill, the brook, the
hawthorn-tree, are all taken straight from the outer world. The features
of Nature and the works of man, the parsonage, the school-house, the
ale-house, all harmonize in one picture, and though the feeling of
desolation must needs be a melancholy one, yet it is wonderfully varied
and relieved by the uncolored faithfulness of the pictures from Nature
and the kindly humor of those of man. It is needless to quote from a poem
which every one knows so well. The verse of Pope is not the best vehicle
for rural description, but it never was employed with greater grace and
transparency than in “The Deserted Village.” In that poem there is fine
feeling for Nature, in her homely forms, and truthful description of
these, but beyond this Goldsmith does not venture. The pathos of the
outward world in its connection with man is there, but no reference to
the meaning of Nature in itself, much less any question of its relation
to the Divine Being and a supersensible world.


COWPER.

Though Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, each in his own way, turned their
eye on rural scenery, and took beautiful pictures and images from it into
their poetry, yet it was none of these, but a later poet, Cowper, who, as
the true successor of Thomson, carried on the descriptive work which he
began. It was in 1730 that the first complete edition of the “Seasons”
appeared. “The Task” was published in 1785. This is the poem in which
Cowper most fully put forth his power as a rural poet. In the first
book, “The Sofa,” he thus quaintly makes the first plunge from indoor to
outdoor life, to which many a time ere the long poem is ended he returns:—

                                  “The Sofa suits
    The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb,
    Though on a sofa, may I never feel:
    For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
    Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
    And skirted thick with intertexture firm
    Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
    O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink,
    E’er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds,
    To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
    And still remember, nor without regret,
    Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
    How oft, my slice of pocket-store consumed,
    Still hungering, penniless, and far from home,
    I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
    Or blushing crabs, and berries that emboss
    The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.”

This, the first rural passage in the “Task,” strikes the note of
difference between Cowper’s way of describing Nature and Thomson’s;
Cowper unhesitatingly introduces the personal element, describes actual
and individual scenes as he himself saw them in his morning or evening
walk. Or when rural scenes are not thus personally introduced, they
everywhere come in as interludes in the midst of the poet’s keen interest
in human affairs, his quiet and delicate humor, his tender sympathy
with the poor and the suffering, his indignation against human wrong,
his earnest brooding over human destiny, and his forward glances to a
time when visible things will give place to a higher and brighter order.
Thomson, on the other hand, describes Nature as seen by itself, separate
and apart from human passion, or relieved only by some vapid episodes of
a false Arcadianism. Hence, great as is Thomson’s merit for having, first
of his age, gone back to Nature, the interest he awakes in it is feeble,
because with him Nature is so divorced from individuality and from man.
It is Nature in the general rather than the individual scene which he
describes—Nature aloof from rather than combined with man. But her full
depth and tenderness she never reveals except to the heart that throbs
with human interest.

But though Cowper sees the outer world as set off against his own
personal moods and the interests of man, yet he does not allow these to
discolor his scenes or to blur the exactness of their outlines. Fidelity,
absolute veracity, characterize his descriptions. He himself says that he
took nothing at second-hand, and all his pictures bear witness to this.
Homely, of course, flat, tame, was the country he dwelt in and described.
But to this day that Huntingdonshire landscape, and the flats by the
sluggish Ouse, in themselves so unbeautiful, acquire a charm to the eye
of the traveler from the remembered poetry of the “Task” and for the sake
of him who wrote it. By that poetry it may be said that he

    “For scenes not beautiful did more
    Than beauty for the fairest scenes can do.”

As one out of many landscapes described, take this:—

    “How oft upon yon eminence our pace
    Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
    The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
    While admiration, feeding at the eye,
    And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
    Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned,
    The distant plow slow-moving, and beside
    His laboring team, that swerved not from the track,
    The sturdy swain diminished to a boy!
    Here Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain
    Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,
    Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
    Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
    Stand, never overlooked, our favorite elms,
    That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;
    While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
    That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
    The sloping land recedes into the clouds;
    Displaying, on its varied side, the grace
    Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
    Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
    Just undulates upon the listening ear,
    Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote.
    Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed,
    Please daily, and whose novelty survives
    Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.
    Praise justly due to those that I describe.”

An ordinary prospect, you say, described in very ordinary poetry. Yes,
but the scene is a real scene, one of England’s veritable landscapes,
and the lines which describe it are genuine poetry,—exact, transparent,
lingering lovingly over the scene which the eye rests on. And for its
being ordinary description, no doubt it flows easily and naturally
along, but let any one try to describe as common a prospect in verse,
and he will find that this is not ordinary verse, but instinct with that
unobtrusive grace which only true poets attain.

Then how frequently the commonest country sights awaken Cowper’s touch of
native humor. Here is what he says of the mole and his work: we—

                              “Feel at every step
    Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,
    Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.
    He, not unlike the great ones of mankind,
    Disfigures earth, and, plotting in the dark,
    Toils much to earn a monumental pile
    That may record the mischiefs he has done.”

In Keble’s “Essay on Sacred Poetry” I lately read the following
comparison between Cowper and Burns as descriptive poets. “Compare,”
he says, “the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if
we mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the
conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an enthusiast
in his love of the works of Nature, the other, driven by disappointment
or weariness to solace himself with them as he might.... The one
all-overflowing with the love of Nature, and indicating at every turn,
that whatever his lot in life, he could not have been happy without
her; the other visibly and wisely soothing himself, but not without
effort, by attending to rural objects in default of some more congenial
happiness, of which he had almost come to despair. The latter, in
consequence, laboriously sketching every object that came in his way;
the other, in one or two rapid lines which operate, as it were, like a
magician’s spell, presenting to the fancy just that picture which was
wanted to put the reader’s mind in unison with the writer’s.” And then
Keble quotes, in illustration of the difference, the description of
Evening in the fourth book of the “Task,” set over against the truly
pastoral chant of “Dainty Davie.” I cannot regard this estimate of
the two poets as altogether true. The passage which Keble quotes from
Cowper is not one of his happiest. “Evening” is there personified in
conventional fashion, as “with matron-step slow moving,” with night
treading “on her sweeping train.” If the two poets are to be compared at
all, let it be when both are at their best. Again, is it quite fair to
contrast poetry of description with the poetry of lyric passion, and to
reject the former because it does not possess the vivid glow that belongs
to the latter? Moreover, the country which Cowper had before him suited
better a sober and meditative than an impassioned strain. There can be no
doubt that Cowper turned to Nature as a relief and solace from too sad
thoughts rather than with the rapture of a fresh heart and a youthful
love. But Keble surely would have been the last to deny that this is a
legitimate use to make of Nature. He, before most men, would have felt
that that is one of the finest ministries of Nature which Cowper thus
expresses:—

    “Our groves were planted to console at noon
    The pensive wanderer in their shades, at eve
    The moonbeam, sliding softly in between
    The sleeping leaves is all the light they wish,
    Birds warbling all the music.”

If it be one of Nature’s offices to make the young and the happy happier,
it is her no less genuine and beneficent work to lighten, by her glad or
reposeful looks, aged hearts that may be world-weary or desponding.

How exact, faithful, and literally true in his record of the appearances
of Nature Cowper is, we have seen. It remains to ask whether he had any
philosophy of Nature, and if so, what it was. It could not be that one so
devout could look habitually on the face of Nature without asking himself
how all this visible vastness stands related to the Invisible One whom
his heart held commune with. All remember his well-known line,—

    “God made the country, but man made the town,”

and this thought echoes through all his praises of the country, and
enhances his pleasure in it. But it is not only by incidental allusion
that Cowper lets us know his thoughts on these things. The “Task”
contains two long passages, one in the “Winter Morning Walk,” from line
733 to 906, and another in “The Winter Walk at Noon,” from line 181 to
254, in which his feelings on this subject find full utterance, opening
with the noble words,—

    “He is the freeman whom the Truth makes free,
    And all are slaves beside.”

In the former passage, of the man whose heart is set free with this
heavenly freedom he says, in words well known,

    “He looks abroad into the varied field
    Of Nature, and ...
    Calls the delightful scenery all his own.
    His are the mountains, and the valleys his,
    And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy
    With a propriety that none can feel,
    But who, with filial confidence inspired,
    Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
    And smiling say, ‘My Father made them all.’”

And so throughout this whole passage he continues in a strain akin to
that of Thomson’s Hymn, but more intimate and devout, his acknowledgment
of Him whom he calls “The only just Proprietor” of Nature. It is He who
alike

        “Gives its lustre to an insect’s wing,
    And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds.”

When He has enlightened the eye and touched the mortal ear—

    “In that blest moment, Nature throwing wide
    Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
    The Author of her beauties, who, retired
    Behind his own creation, works unseen
    By the impure, and hears his word denied.

    ...

    “But, O thou bounteous Giver of all good,
    Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!
    Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor,
    And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away.”

A finer strain of rapturous piety could not be, but yet in it all there
is no advance beyond the old conception of a dead mechanical world,
which God, himself removed aloof, moves entirely from without. There is
no hint that Nature is alive with a life received from God himself, and
mysteriously connected with Him.

But in the second passage alluded to his thought about Nature takes a
higher reach. Speaking of the revival of the earth under the touch of
spring, he teaches that

                        “There lives and moves
    A soul in all things, and that soul is God.”

Then, alluding to the view, entertained by many, then as now, that what
we call Nature’s operations are upheld and carried forward by fixed laws,
which spare the Maker all further trouble, he asserts that all things are
impelled

    “To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
    And under pressure of some conscious cause.
    The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
    Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
    Nature is but a name for an effect
    Whose cause is God.”

Nor does he step at this merely theistic view. He goes on to the
distinctly Christian teaching of St. John and St. Paul, so easy to
assert, so hard to take home to the feelings and imagination, that it is
the Eternal and Incarnate Word who is the Creator and Sustainer of this
visible universe.

    “All are under One. One Spirit—his
    Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows—
    Rules universal Nature. Not a flower
    But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
    Of his unrivaled pencil.”

No doubt Cowper held and believed this firmly, and it may be at times
had keen intuition of its truth. But it cannot be said that he attained
to make it felt in his ordinary descriptions of the every-day landscape.
He does not describe Nature as if he habitually saw it as a living being
plastic to an overruling and informing spirit. Rather he beheld her more
as common eyes behold her, as a mechanism, with fixed features and a
definite outline, which do not spontaneously, and without an exertion
of thought, lend themselves as vehicles of spiritual reality. If he had
been more possessed with the mystical vision he might have been a higher
poet for the few. He would not have been what he has been called, the
best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear, the familiar companion
of every quiet English household. But though Cowper’s “Task” is full of
scenery, it is not purely, or even mainly, descriptive poetry. More than
its rural character is its deep, tender, universal human-heartedness.
Man and his interests are paramount, as paramount as in Pope or any other
city poet. Only it is not the conventional, not the surface part of man,
but that which is permanent in him and universal. In his indignation
against injustice and oppression, his hatred of slavery, his large sense
of universal brotherhood, and his revolt against all that hinders it, we
already hear in his poetry the not far-off murmur of the Revolution, and
of the new era it was bringing in. His denunciation of the Bastile but
four years before it fell—

    “Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
    Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair,
    There’s not an English heart that would not leap
    To hear that ye were fallen at last,”—

is a fitting prelude to that prayer of thanksgiving which Wordsworth
raised a few years afterward from Morecombe Sands when he first heard of
the fall of Robespierre. It is because Cowper’s poetry throbs with this
deep and universal human sympathy that its background of landscape, plain
as it is, and untransfigured by passion, comes in with such graceful and
refreshing relief. Of Cowper’s descriptions may be said what Wordsworth
says of his own, there is always

                    “Some happy tone
    Of meditation slipping in between
    The beauty coming and the beauty gone.”

And this it is that gives them their peculiar charm.


BURNS.

The rural descriptions and the reflections on the outer world contained
in the poetry of Cowper, mark the highest limit which the feeling for
Nature had reached in England at the close of last century. But the
stream of natural poetry in England, which up to that time had been fed
from purely native sources, and which had flowed on through all last
century with ever increasing volume, received toward the close of the
century affluents from other regions, which tinged the color and modified
the direction of its future current. Of these affluents the first and
most powerful was the poetry of Burns. It is strange to think that Cowper
and he were singing their songs at the same time, each in his own way
describing the scenery that surrounded him, and yet that they hardly knew
of each other’s existence.

Burns not only lived in a world of nature, of society, and of feeling,
wholly alien to that of Cowper, but he took for his models far different
poets. These models were the Scottish rhymers, Allan Ramsay, Ferguson,
and the unknown singers of the native ballads, and especially of the
popular songs, of his country. Proud and self-reliant as Burns was, he
everywhere speaks of Ramsay and Ferguson as his models and superiors.
From these he took the forms of his poems, though into these forms he
poured a new and stronger inspiration. Burns’s “Halloween” is framed
on a model of Ferguson’s poem called “Leith Races,” and “The Cottar’s
Saturday Night” is evidently suggested by Ferguson’s “Farmer’s Ingle;”
but poor Ferguson’s very mundane view of happiness is, at least in the
“Cottar’s Saturday Night,” by Burns, transfigured by a purer and nobler
sentiment. Besides these Burns knew the English poets, such as Pope and
Shenstone, but well for the world that he did not come too early under
their influence, else we had probably lost much of what is most native
and original in him. Somewhere in his later years he marvels at his own
audacity in having ventured to use his native Scotch as the vehicle for
poetry, and speaks as if, had he earlier known more English literature,
he would not have dared to do so. Yet when he does essay to write pure
English his poetry becomes only of third or fourth-rate excellence, just
as nothing can be more mawkish and vapid than Ferguson, when he makes
Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one
poem, written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and
that one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except
it may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect
more in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth,
the features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to
be rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives.
When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language,
they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If
in Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove,
instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the locality
described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still more of
mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words which the country
people apply to their own hills, you had better leave them undescribed.
This feeling has at last forced both poets, and all who attempt to
render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic words by which the mountain
lineaments are described. We must, if we would name these features
at all, speak of the “corrie,” the “lochan,” the “balloch,” and the
“screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-English has no words for these
things. Hence it is that Scottish Lowland scenery is never so truly and
vividly described, as when Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns
was no merely descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of
his poems in which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere
with him, man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his
pictures, and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature
loved with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because
his pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can
recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-songs,
in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s eye. In that
longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and character, “The
Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening with which the poem
closes!—

    “By this, the sun was out o’ sight,
    An’ darker gloamin brought the night:
    The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone,
    The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan;
    When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs,
    Rejoiced they were na men but dogs;
    An’ each took aff his several way,
    Resolved to meet some ither day.”

“The kye stood rowting in the loan,” what a picture is that of an
old-fashioned Lowland farm, with the loane or lane, between two dikes,
leading up to the out-field or moor! All who have known the reality will
at once recognize the truth of the picture, in which the kye, as they
come home at gloamin’, stop and low, ere they enter the byre: to others
it is uncommunicable.

Or take that description in “Halloween” of the burn and the adventure
there:—

    “Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
      As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;
    Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays
      Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
    Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,
      Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;
    Whyles cookit underneath the braes
      Below the spreading hazel,
                  Unseen that night.

    “Amang the brachens on the brae,
      Between her an’ the moon,
    The Deil, or else an outler Quey,
      Gat up an’ gae a croon:
    Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool;
      Near lav’rock-height she jumpit,
    But mist a fit, an’ in the pool
      Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,
                  Wi’ a plunge that night.”

Would any one who can feel the force of that description allow that it
could be expressed in literary English without losing much of its charm?

I have said that Burns’s glances at Nature are almost all incidental,
and, by the way, and this enhances their value. There is, however, a
passage in an Epistle to William Simpson, in which he addresses Nature
directly, and speaks out more consciously the feeling with which she
inspired him:—

    “O, sweet are Coila’s haughs an’ woods,
    When lintwhites chant amang the buds,
    And jinkin hares, in amorous whids,
                  Their loves enjoy,
    While thro’ the braes the cushat croods
                  Wi’ wailfu’ cry!

    “Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me
    When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;
    Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree
                  Are hoary gray;
    Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,
                  Dark’ning the day!

    “O Nature a’ thy shews and forms
    To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms!
    Whether the summer kindly warms
                  Wi’ life an’ light,
    Or winter howls, in gusty storms,
                  The lang, dark night!

    “The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
    Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,
    Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
                  An’ no think lang;
    O sweet, to stray an’ pensive ponder
                  A heart-felt sang!”

Three things may be noted as to the influence of Burns on men’s feeling
for Nature.

First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate singer
who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more free,
close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-singers.
He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer world, and
the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His keen eye looked
directly, with no intervening medium, on the face alike of Nature and
of man, and embraced all creation in one large sympathy. With familiar
tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures, felt for their sufferings,
as if they had been his own, and opened men’s hearts to feel how much
the groans of creation are needlessly increased by the indifference or
cruelty of man. In Burns, as in Cowper, and in him perhaps more than
in Cowper, there was a large going forth of tenderness to the lower
creatures, and in their poetry this first found utterance, and in no poet
since their time, so fully as in these two.

Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the English
poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was nothing short
of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been thrilled with the same
delight, he alone of all in last century expressed the thrill. In this,
as in other things, he is the truest herald of that strain of rejoicing
in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has formed one of the finest tones in
the poetry of this century.

Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man; he
feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him
part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons about
the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of man.


THE BALLADS.

But another affluent to the growing sentiment, besides Burns, was
the ballad-poetry rediscovered, we may say, towards the end of last
century. The most decisive mark of this change in literary taste was the
collection by Bishop Percy of the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry” in 1765;
and this production did much to deepen and expand the taste out of which
itself arose. The impulse which began with Bishop Percy may be said to
have culminated when Scott gave to the world his “Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border,” in the opening years of the present century.

The ballads of course are mainly engaged with human incidents, heroic
and legendary. Yet they contain many side-glances at Nature, as it
interwove itself with the actions or the sufferings of men, which are
very affecting. This is the way that the sight of Ettrick Forest struck
the king and his men as they marched against the outlaw who “won” there—

    “The king was cuming thro’ Caddon Ford,
      And full five thousand men was he;
    They saw the derke Foreste them before,
      They thought it awsome for to see.”

Or take again the impression made on the traveling knight as he comes on
Clyde in full flood:—

    “As he gaed owre yon high high hill
      And doun yon dowie den,
    There was a roar in Clyde water,
      Had fear’d a hundred men.”

Or that other gentler pathetic touch, where the maiden says—

    “Yestreen I dreamed a dolefu’ dream
      I fear there will be sorrow,
    I dreamed I pu’d the heather green
      Wi’ my true love, on Yarrow.

    “O gentle wind, that bloweth south,
      From where my love repaireth,
    Convey a kiss from his dear mouth,
      And tell me how he fareth!”

In verses such as these, which abound throughout the popular ballads and
songs, we see the outer world, not as it appeared to the highly educated
poet, seeking to express it in artistic phrase, but as it showed itself
to the eyes and hearts of country-people, living quite familiarly among
its sights and sounds. Much more might be said of the natural imagery
of the ballads, and of the feeling toward the outer world indicated by
it. Suffice it to note that the simplicity and pathos, both of sentiment
and of expression, which the ballads contained, entering, with other
influences, into the minds of the young generation which first welcomed
them, called up another view of Nature than that which the literary poets
had expressed, and affected most deeply both the feeling and the form of
the new poetry of Nature which this century brought in.


OSSIAN.

One more poetic influence, born of last century, must be noticed before
we close. I mean the Celtic or Ossianic feeling about Nature.

I am not going now to discuss whether Macpherson composed the Gaelic
poems which still pass for Ossian’s, or whether he only collected songs
which had been floated down by tradition from a remote antiquity.
Whichever view we take, it cannot be questioned that the appearance of
this poetry gave to the English-speaking mind the thrill of a new and
strange emotion about mountain scenery. Whether the poetry was old,
or the product of last century, it describes, as none other does, the
desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the
mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and
stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing
cataracts, the ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland
shores or on the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an
unbeliever in Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was

    “Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent
    As by a spirit turbulent,
    Where sights are rough and sounds are wild
    And everything unreconciled,
    In some complaining dim retreat,
    For fear and melancholy meet.”

And such are the scenes which the Ossianic poetry mainly dwells on. Here
is a description of a battle—

    “As hundred winds ’mid oaks of great mountains,
    As hundred torrents from lofty hills,
    As clouds in darkness rushing on,
    As the great ocean tumbling on the shore,
    So vast, so sounding, dark and stern,
    Met the fierce warriors on Lena.
    The shout of the host on the mountain height
    Was like thunder on a night of storms,
    When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens,
    And thousand spirits wildly shriek
    On the waste whirlwind of the hills.”

And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by
gleams of tender light—

    “Pleasing to me are the words of songs,
    Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone;
    Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild
    On the brake and knoll of roes,
    When slowly rises the sun
    On the silent flank of hoary Bens—
    The loch, unruffled, far away,
    Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.”[16]

Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these
mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and
prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it.

Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the
minds that were still young when this century opened, and added each a
fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision into the
life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken
men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and
aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded
hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they
had never done before, and to love her with a new passion. But original
as this impulse in the present century has been, we must not forget how
much it owed, both in itself and in its manifold forms of expression, to
the poetry of Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that
poetry there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these
the popular one was probably the most powerful in moulding the Poetry
that was about to be.



CHAPTER XIV.

WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF NATURE.


There are at least three distinct stages in men’s attitude towards the
external world. First comes the unconscious love of children—of those at
least whose home is in the country—for all rural things, for birds and
beasts, for the trees and the fields. The next stage is that of youth and
early manhood, which commonly gets so absorbed in trade, and business,
politics, literature, or science,—that is, in the practical world of man,
that the early caring for Nature disappears from the heart, perhaps never
again to revisit it. The third and last stage is that of—some at least,
perhaps of many—men, who, after much intercourse with the world, and
after having, it may be, suffered in it, return to the calm, cool places
of Nature, and find there a solace, a refreshment, something in harmony
with their best thoughts, which they have not discovered in their youth,
it may be because they then less needed it.

Something like this takes place in the history of the race. Not to
mention the savage state, men in the primeval era, when history first
finds them, are affected by the visible world around them much as we
see children and boys now are. Nature is almost everything to them.
They use the forces, and receive the influences of it, if not in a
wholly animal way, yet in a quite unconscious, unreflecting way. Then
advancing civilization creates city life and affairs, in which man, with
his material, social, and mental interests, takes the place of Nature,
which then retires into the background. The love of it either wholly
disappears or becomes a very subordinate matter. So it has been, so it
still is, with whole populations, which know nothing beyond the purlieus
of great cities. But probably the intensest feeling for Nature is that
which is engendered out of the heart of the latest, perhaps over-refined,
civilization. Ages that have been over-civilized turn away from their
too highly-strung interests, their too feverish excitements, to find a
peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the equability of Nature.
Vinet has well said that “the more the soul has been cultivated by social
intercourse, and especially the more it has suffered from it, the more,
in short, society is disturbed and agonized, the more rich and profound
Nature becomes,”—mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her from
out the ardent and tumultuous centre of civilization.

Towards the end of last century Europe had reached this third stage. In
all the foremost nations it showed itself by this as one among many new
symptoms, that there was an awakening to the presence of Nature, and
to the power of it, with an intimacy and vividness unknown before. Men
became aware of the presence of the visible world, and, almost startled
by it, they asked what it meant. What was so old and familiar came home
to them as if it were now for the first time discovered. Here and there
were men who, having had their fevered pulses stimulated almost to
madness by the throes that preceded or accompanied the Revolution, turned
instinctively to find repose in the eternal freshness that is in the
outer world. This tendency showed itself in different ways in different
countries, and expressed itself variously, according to the nature of
the men who were the organs of it. In France this new passion for Nature
found a representative in Rousseau, as early as 1759, in whose writings,
in spite of their mawkish sentiment, their morbid “self-torturing,” their
false politics and distorted morality, all men of taste have felt the
fascination of their eloquence and the picturesqueness with which the
shores of the Leman Lake are described. Later in the century, Goethe,
in Germany, expressed the same feeling with all the difference there is
between the Teutonic and the Gallic genius. More than any poet before
him, or any since, he combined the scientific with the poetic view of
Nature, or rather he studied the facts and laws of Nature with the eye
of a physicist, and saw the beauty that is in these with the eye of
a poet. It has been said of him that he worshiped God in Nature. It
would be more true to say, that perceiving intelligently the unity that
pervades all things, he felt intensely the beauty of that unity, he
delighted in the wide views of the Universe which science had recently
unfolded. But as the moral side of things, as duty and self-surrender
hardly entered into his thoughts, it is misleading to speak of merely
scientific contemplation and æsthetic delight as worship or devotion.
Worship implies a personal relation to a personal being, and this was
hardly in Goethe’s thoughts at all. But whatever may be the true account
of his ultimate views, he is the German representative of the great wave
of feeling of which I speak.

It was a fortunate thing for England that when the time had come when she
was to open and expand her heart towards Nature, as she had never before
done, the function of leading the new movement and of expressing it was
committed to a soul like Wordsworth’s,—a soul in which sensibility, far
healthier than that of Rousseau, and deeper than that of Goethe, was
based on a moral nature, simple, solid, profound. It is the way in all
great changes of every kind. When the change is to come, the man who is
by his nature predestined to make it comes too. So it was in history and
in art. Contemporary with Wordsworth’s movement, a change in these was
needed. Men ever since the Reformation had got so absorbed in the new
order of things, that they had quite forgotten the old, and had become
ignorant of and unsympathetic to the past. So history, art, architecture,
and many other things, had become meagre and starved. Men’s minds, in
this country at least, had to be made aware that there had lived brave
men before Cromwell, good men before Luther and Knox. And Walter Scott
was born into the world to teach it this lesson, and to let in the
sympathies of men in full tide on the buried centuries. The change which
Scott wrought in men’s way of apprehending history was not greater than
that which Wordsworth wrought in their feelings towards the world of
Nature, with which, not less than with the world of History, their lives
are encompassed. If Scott taught men to look with other eyes on the
characters of the past, Wordsworth not the less taught them to do the
same towards the present earth around them, and the heavens above them.
This was indeed but half of Wordsworth’s function. For he had moral truth
to communicate to his generation, not less than naturalistic truth. It
is, however, with the latter order of truth that we have now to do. Yet
in him each kind of truth was so interpenetrated with the other, they
were balanced in such harmony, that it is not possible in any study of
him to dissever them.

Thus it seems that two poets were the chief agents in letting in on
men’s minds two great bodies of sentiment, the one historical, the other
naturalistic, which have leavened all modern society, and even visibly
changed the outward face of things. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, at the Scott
Centenary, remarked that the mention of any spot by Scott, in his poems
or romances, has increased the market value of the surrounding acres
more than the highest farming could do. And there is not an inn or small
farm-house in all the Lake country which does not reap every summer in
hard coin the results of Wordsworth’s poetry. Can even the stoutest
utilitarian, seeing these things, say that Poetry is mere sentimental
moonshine, with no power on men’s lives an actions?

To understand what Wordsworth did as an interpreter of Nature, we must
bear in mind the experience through which he passed, the natural gifts
and the mental discipline which fitted him to be so. He was sprung from a
hardy North of England stock that had lived for generations in Yorkshire,
afterwards in Cumberland, in a social place intermediate between the
squires and the yeomen, and from both his parents he had received the
inheritance of a moral nature that was healthy, frugal, and robust. Early
left an orphan, with three brothers and one sole sister, his childish
recollections attached themselves rather to school than to home. At the
age of eight he went with his brothers to Hawkshead, “an antique village,
standing a little way to the west of Windermere, on its own lake of
Esthwaite, and possessing an ancient and once famous grammar school.”
There he boarded with a humble village dame, and attended the school by
day; but it was a school in which our modern high-pressure system was
unknown, and which left the boys ample leisure to wander late and early
by the lake-margins, through the copses, and on the mountain-sides.
Of the village dame under whose roof he lodged he has left a pleasing
portrait in “The Prelude.” The early and not the least beautiful part
of that poem, and many of his most delightful shorter poems, refer to
things seen and felt at that time. For, as the late Arthur Clough has
truly said, “it was then and there beyond a doubt, that the substantive
Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall rock and
sounding cataract haunted him like a passion, and that his genius and
whole being united and identified itself with external Nature.” From
this primitive village school, he passed like other north-country lads,
to Cambridge, where he spent three years, the least profitable years
of his life, if any years are unprofitable to a man like him. More
profit he got from summer visits to his own country, Hawkshead, and his
mother’s relations, and especially from a walking tour through France,
Switzerland, and the Italian lakes,—regions then but little trod by
Englishmen. After graduating at Cambridge he gladly left it in 1791 to
plunge headlong into the first fervor of the French Revolution.

The high hopes which that event awoke in him, as in many another
enthusiast, the dreams that a new era was about to dawn on down-trodden
man, these things are an oft-told tale. When the revolutionary frenzy
culminated in bloodshed and the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth’s faith
in it remained for long unshaken and unchanged. On the scenes which
appalled others he looked undismayed, and even seriously pondered himself
becoming a leader in the business. Luckily for himself and the world,
he was recalled from France towards the close of 1792 by some stern
home-measures, probably the cutting short of his always scanty supplies.
In 1793 he published an “Apology for the French Revolution,” in which
he rails against all the most cherished institutions of England, and
recommends the Utopia of absolute democracy as the one remedy for all the
ills which afflict the world. Not even the murder of Louis XVI., nor the
bloodshed and horrors which followed, shook him. The fall of Robespierre
in July, 1794, gave him new heart to believe that his golden dreams would
yet be realized. But when from the struggle he saw emerge, not freedom,
peace, and universal brotherhood, but the First Consul with his armies,
his high hopes at last gave way. Despairing of the destinies of mankind,
he wandered about the country aimless, dejected, almost in despondency.
Public affairs never appear so dark as when a man’s own private affairs
are getting desperate. And such was Wordsworth’s case at that time. He
had no profession, no aim in life, was almost entirely destitute of
funds. From absolute want he was relieved in 1795 by the bequest of
nine hundred pounds left to him by his friend Raisley Calvert. This
enabled his sister—a soul hardly less gifted, and altogether as noble
as himself—from whom he had been much separated, to take up house with
him, and to minister not only to his bodily but much more to his mental
needs. Seeing that his office on earth was to be a poet, she turned him
away from brooding over dark social and moral problems, and led him to
look once more on the open face of Nature, and to mingle familiarly with
humble men. They made themselves a home, first in Dorsetshire, then in
Somersetshire, where Coleridge joined them. Then it was that, warmed by
the society of his sister and his poet friend, and wandering freely among
the hills of Quantock, the fountain of his poetic heart was opened, which
was to flow on for years. Soon followed the final settlement, in the last
days of last century, in the small cottage at the Townhead of Grasmere,
which became their home for more than eight years, and will forever
continue to be identified with the most splendid era of Wordsworth’s
genius. For it was during the years immediately preceding Grasmere, and
during the eight Grasmere years, that he attained to embody in one poem
after another the finest effluence of his spirit.

It was almost entirely at Grasmere, between the years 1800 and 1805,
that he composed “The Prelude,” an autobiographic poem on the growth
of his own mind. It is for the purpose of better understanding this
poem that I have given the foregoing brief framework of the outward
facts of Wordsworth’s life on which “The Prelude” comments from within.
The poem consists of fourteen books in blank verse, probably the most
elaborate biographic poem ever composed. Readers of Lord Macaulay’s
Life may perhaps remember his remarks on it: “There are,” he says, “the
old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy
about the effects of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical
metaphysics; the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic declamations
interspersed.” No one need be astonished at this estimate by Lord
Macaulay. We see but as we feel. To him, being such as he was, it was
not given to feel or to see the things which Wordsworth most cared for.
No wonder, then, that to him the poem that spoke of these things was
a weariness. Doubtless much may be said against such a subject for a
poem—the growth of a poet’s mind from childhood to maturity: much too
against the execution, the sustained self-analysis, the prolixity of
some parts, the verbosity and sometimes the vagueness of the language.
But after making full deduction for all these things, it still remains a
wonderful and unique poem, most instructive to those who will take the
trouble required to master such a work. If after a certain acquaintance
with Wordsworth’s better-known and more attractive poems, a person will
but study “The Prelude,” he will return to the other poems with a new
insight into their meaning and their truth.

How highly Coleridge esteemed it those know who remember the poem in
which he describes the impression made on himself by hearing Wordsworth
read it aloud for the first time after its completion:—

                          “An Orphic song indeed,
    A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts,
    To their own music chanted.”

This poem, read to Coleridge in 1805, was not given to the world till
July, 1850, a few months after the author’s death. The reason why I
shall now dwell on it at some length is because no other production of
Wordsworth’s gives us so deep and sustained a view of his feeling about
Nature, and of the relation which he believed to exist between Nature and
the soul of man.

In Wordsworth’s mental history two periods are especially prominent. The
first was his school-time at Hawkshead, by Esthwaite Lake, eight years
in all. The second was the mental crisis through which he passed after
his return from France till he settled with his sister in the south
of England, and ultimately at Grasmere. The first was the spring-time
of his soul—a fair spring-time, in which all the young impulses and
intuitions were first awakened, when the colors were laid in and deeply
engrained into every fibre of his being. The second was the trial time,
the crisis of his spirit, in which all his early impulses, impressions,
intuitions, were brought out into distinct consciousness, questioned
and tested—vindicated by reason, and embraced by will as his guiding
principles for life—in which, as one may say, all that had hitherto
existed inwardly in fluid vapor was gathered up, condensed, solidified
into deliberate substance and permanent purpose.

A healthful, happy, blissful school-time was that which Wordsworth spent
by Esthwaite Lake—natural, blameless, pure, as ever boy spent. School
rules were few, discipline was light, school hours were short, and, these
over, the boys were free to roam where they willed, far or near, high and
low, early and late, sometimes far into the frosty starlight. Then it was
that Nature first

    “Peopled his mind with forms sublime and fair,”

came to him like instincts unawares, as he went about his usual sports
with his companions. Rowing on the lake, snaring woodcocks among the hill
copses by night, skating by starlight on the frozen lake, climbing crags
to harry the raven’s nest, scudding on horseback over Furness Sands:—

    “From week to week, from month to month, we lived
    A round of tumult.”

In all this there was not anything lackadaisical, nor any maundering
about Nature, but only the life you might expect in a hardy mountain-bred
boy, with robust body and strong animal spirits. These things he shared
with other boys. There was nothing special in them. But what was
peculiar, eminently his own, was this—the feelings that sometimes came
to him in the very midst of the wild hill sports—in the pauses of the
boisterous games. There were times when, detached from his companions,
alone in lonely places, he felt from within

    “Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth
    And common face of Nature spake to him
    Rememberable things.”

During his later school years he tells us that he would walk alone under
the quiet stars, and

            “Feel whate’er there is of power in sound
    To breathe an elevated mood, by form
    Or image unprofaned, and I would stand,
    In the night blackened with a coming storm,
    Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
    The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
    Or make their dim abode in distant winds,
    Thence did I drink the visionary power.”

He speaks, too, of a morning when he had stolen forth before even the
birds were astir,

                    “And sate among the woods
    Alone upon some jutting eminence,
    At the first gleam of dawnlight, when the vale,
    Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.
    How shall I seek the origin? where find
    Faith in the marvelous things which then I felt?
    Oft in these moments such a holy calm
    Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
    Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
    Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
    A prospect in the mind.”

These were his supreme moments of existence, when the vision first dawned
upon his soul, when without knowing it he was baptized with an effluence
from on high, consecrated to be the poet-priest of Nature’s mysteries.
The light that then came to him was in after years “the master-light of
all his seeing,” the fountain-head of his highest inspirations. From this
was drawn that peculiar ethereal gleam which rests on his finest after
productions—the ode to the Cuckoo, the poems on Matthew, Tintern Abbey,
the Intimations of Immortality, and many another poem. Not that he knew
in these accesses of soul what he was receiving. He felt them at the
time, and passed on. Only long afterwards, when

    “The eagerness of infantine desire”

was over, in hours of tranquil thought, the remembrance of those bright
moments recurred, with a sense of distance from his present self so
remote, that

                      “Often did he seem
    Two consciousnesses, conscious of himself,
    And of some other being.”

The Prelude contains nothing more beautiful Of instructive than the whole
account of that Hawkshead school-time. It portrays the wonderful boyhood
of a wonderful boy, though neither he himself nor others then thought
him the least wonderful. Reflecting on it long afterwards, Wordsworth
saw, and every student of his poetry will see, that in that time lay the
secret of his power, by the impulses then received his whole philosophy
of life and of poetry was determined. Natural objects, he tells us, then
came home to him primarily through the human affections and associations
of which they are the outward framework,—just as the infant when he
first comes to know sensible objects, learns to associate them with the
interventions of the touch, the look, the tenderness of its mother.
Gradually, even before school-time was past, Nature had come to have a
meaning and an attraction for him, by herself, without the need of such
intervening agents.

Further, he tells us, that while for him at that time each individual
rock, tree, and flower, had an interest of its own, he came deeply to
feel the great living whole which Nature is. All his thoughts, he says,
were steeped in feeling.

                      “I was only then
    Contented, when with bliss ineffable
    I felt the sentiment of being spread
    O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;
    O’er all that lost beyond the reach of thought
    And human knowledge, to the human eye
    Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
    O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,
    Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
    Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
    And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not
    If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
    Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
    With every form of creature, as it looked
    Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
    Of adoration, with an eye of love.”

“Towards the Uncreated,”—the looking thitherward through both Nature
and his own moral being, so as to find both based on one Divine order,
witnessing to one Eternal Being, this is one of Wordsworth’s deepest
tendencies. This is his teaching in many forms, emphatically in the “Ode
to Duty,” of which, after recognizing duty as the law of his own being,
he exclaims,

    “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
    And the eternal heavens through thee are fresh and strong.”

The passage last quoted from “The Prelude” has the same meaning, and
testifies that from and through his communing with Nature he had learnt,
even in boyhood, a true and real natural religion—had felt his soul
come into contact with Him who is at once the author and upholder of
Nature and of man. Not perhaps that, in his school days, he was fully
aware of what he then learnt. He felt at the time, he learnt to know
what he felt afterwards. At Cambridge, when surrounded by trivial and
uncongenial interests, he became aware that he had brought with him from
the mountains powers to counterwork these—

                    “Independent solaces,
    Incumbencies more awful, visitings
    Front the Upholder of the tranquil soul.”

What then was the spiritual nutriment he had gathered from that boyhood
passed in Nature’s immediate presence? He had felt, and after reflection
had made the feelings a rooted and habitual conviction, that the world
without him, the thing we call Nature, is not a dead machine, but
something all pervaded by a life—sometimes he calls it a soul; that this
living Nature was a unity; that there was that in it which awoke in
him feelings of calmness, awe, and tenderness; that this infinite life
in Nature was not something which he attributed to Nature, but that it
existed external to him, independent of his thoughts and feelings, and
was in no way the creation of his own mind; that, though his faculties
in nowise created those qualities in Nature, they might go forth and
aspire towards them, and find support in them; that even when he was
withdrawn from the presence of that Nature and these qualities, yet
that they subsist quite independent of his perceptions of them. And
the conviction that Nature there was living on all the same, whether
he heeded her or not, imparted to his mind kindred calm and coolness,
and fed it with thoughts of majesty. This, or something like it, is
the conviction which he tries to express in “The Prelude.” Those vague
emotions, those visionary gleams which came to him in the happier moments
of boyhood, before which the solid earth was all unsubstantialized
and transfigured—these he held to be, though he could not prove it,
intimations coming to his soul direct from God. In one of these moments,
a glorious summer morning, when he was spending a Cambridge vacation
by the Lakes, he for the first time consciously felt himself to be a
dedicated spirit, consecrated to truth and purity and high unworldly
endeavor.

Again, the invisible voice that came to him through the visible universe
was not in him, as has often been asserted, a Pantheistic conception.
Almost in the same breath he speaks of

    “Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,”

and

    “His pure word by miracle revealed.”

He tells us that he held the speaking face of earth and heaven to be an
organ of intercourse with man,—

    “Established by the sovereign intellect
    Who through that bodily image hath diffused,
    As might appear to the eye of fleeting time,
    A deathless spirit.”

And again, he says that even if the earth was to be burnt up and to
disappear,

    “Yet would the living Presence still subsist
    Victorious.”

To assert this, whatever it may be, is not to preach Pantheism. It is
only to make the earth not a mere piece of mechanism but a vital entity,
and to regard it as in living and intimate relation with Him who made and
upholds it, and speaks to man more or less distinctly through it.

I pass now to the second stage, the great turning point in Wordsworth’s
mental history, which lay between his residence in France and his
settlement at Grasmere, that is, between the years 1793 and 1800.

The three years he had spent at Cambridge, from 1787 till the end of
1790, if they did nothing else for him, had begun to draw out his social
feelings. The order of his interests had been this. In early boyhood
animal activity and trivial pleasures had engrossed him. In due time
these had retired, and, before school-time was over, Nature stood out
preëminent, almost alone, in his affections. Up to his twenty-second
year, man had been to him a quite subordinate object. What Cambridge
began, residence in France had perfected,—his interest in man for his own
sake, and in all the great problems, practical and speculative, connected
with man. These problems, present, more or less, to every age, had by
the revolutionary fervor been quickened into feverish intensity, and
driven on to new and far-reaching issues. Smitten to the core with the
contagion of the time, Wordsworth began to meditate feelingly on man,
his sufferings, his artificial restraints, his aspirations, his destiny.
He pondered long and deeply the questions of government, and the best
forms of it,—of society, of morality and its grounds, of man’s perfection
and its possibility. Even when for a time under the Reign of Terror
his immediate hopes from the Revolution faded, yet he did not cease to
ponder the questions which recent events had brought to the surface. The
fall of Robespierre and his “atheist crew” revived his hopes. Though none
of the public acts of France pleased him, yet his faith in the people was
still strong; no external blunders, he believed, would take “life from
the young Republic.”

For a while he dreamed on his golden dreams about a perfected humanity.
Still for a time to him

                  “The whole earth
    The beauty wore of promise.”...
    “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to the young was heaven.”

But when Britain declared war against France, and France changed a
war of self-defense for one of aggression, then came disgust with
his own country, disappointment and vexation with France, despair of
her promoting the cause of Liberty. Still he clung stubbornly to his
old tenets, and even strained them farther. At last, when he saw the
Emperor crowned by the Pope, this was too much for him. It was the last
opprobrium, the final blow to his republican ardor. He had seen a people
from whom he hoped all things, a nation which erewhile had looked up in
faith to heaven for manna, take a lesson from the dog returning to his
vomit. Then for a time the whole fabric of his hope and faith gave way.
He fell into distrust, not only of nations, but of himself. The faiths,
intuitions, aspirations which he had hitherto lived by, failed him. He
cross-questioned all fundamental principles, and if they could not
vindicate themselves by formal proof, rejected them. At last, losing all
hold on conviction, wearied out with endless perplexities, he doubted all
moral truth, and gave it up in despair. With his hopes for man, and his
faith in man’s destiny, the poetic vision of Nature, which had hitherto
been with him, disappeared, and his immediate converse with Him who
through Nature spoke to him was for a time eclipsed. Under the tyranny
of the logical and analyzing faculty, his intelligence was no longer
an organ which transmitted clearly the light from without to the light
within him, but, entangled in the meshes of the finite understanding,
he could for a time see or receive nothing which he could not verify by
logic. He looked on the outer world no more in a free imaginative way as
of old, but compared scene with scene, and judged and criticised them by
artificial rules.

                              “To the moods
    Of time and season, to the moral power,
    The affections and the spirit of the place
    Insensible.”

This to one like Wordsworth, more than to most men, was abnegation of his
higher self, was in fact moral death. It was the lowest depth into which
he sank, the climax of what he himself calls “his degradation.”

But as his faith in man and his love of Nature had suffered shipwreck
together, it was by the same influence they were restored. From the
temporary obscuration of the master vision, the laying asleep of his
inner faculties, the first thing to arouse him was the influence of human
affection, and that came to him through the presence of his sister,
his “sole sister.” When after his return from France he was wandering
about aimless and dejected, she saw and understood his mental malady.
She made a home for him, and became his hourly companion. If he had
labored zealously to cut off his heart from all the sources of his former
strength, she by her influence and sympathy maintained for him, as he
expresses it, “a saving intercourse with his true self.” She saw that his
true vocation was to be a poet, and a teacher of men through poetry, and
bade him seek in that alone “his office upon earth.” She took him once
more to lonely and beautiful places, till Nature again found access to
him, and, combining with his sister’s human ministry,

                                  “Led him back
    To those sweet counsels between head and heart,
    Whence groweth genuine knowledge fraught with peace.”

Thus began that sanative process which in time restored him to his true
self, to “his natural graciousness of mind,” and made him that blessing
to the world he was destined to become.

But there was not a restoration only, but there came through that
same sister an accession of new emotions, an opening of his heart to
influences heretofore disregarded. His nature was originally, he tells
us, somewhat austere and unbending. She opened his eyes to perceive
in Nature minute lovelinesses formerly unnoticed, his heart to feel
sympathies and tendernesses for human things hitherto uncared for. In her
company, whether they wandered about the country or dwelt in a settled
home, his former delight in Nature returned. He felt once again, like the
breath of spring, visitings of the imaginative power come to him; the
overflowings of “the impassioned life” that is in Nature streamed in upon
him, and he stood in her presence once more

    “A sensitive being, a creative soul.”

The restoration, the sanative process I speak of, showed itself in two
directions, as regards his feeling towards man and towards Nature.

First as to man: his interests and sympathies, stimulated to excess by
the political convulsions he had passed through, now found healthier
objects in the laboring poor whom he conversed with in the fields, and in
the vagrants he met on lonely roads. These became his daily schools. In
many an exquisite poem he has embalmed the incidents and characters he
saw or heard of at that time. His early upbringing combined with after
experience and reflection to make him esteem simple and humble life
more than artificial. The homely ways of the people he had spent his
boyhood with—village dames, hardy dalesmen and shepherds—concurred with
his own native bias to make him love and esteem what is permanent, not
what is accidental in human life, the inner, not the outer man of men,
the essential soul, not its trappings of birth, fortune, and position.
This native bias had been deepened by all he had seen, felt, and thought
during the revolutionary ferment, and now became the fixed habit and
purpose of his mind, part of his permanent self. For in humble men, when
not wholly crushed or hardened by penury, he seemed to see the primary
passions and elementary feelings of human nature existing as it were in
their native bed—freer, stronger, more unalloyed than in men of so-called
position and education, who, as he thought, were often overlaid by
artifice and conventionality. The formalities which pass by the name of
education he thought have little to do with real feeling and just sense,
and intercourse with the talking world does little to improve men. He
therefore turned away from artificial to natural man, and resolved to let
the world know what he had seen and found in men and women whose outside
was least attractive.

    “Of these, said I, shall be my song, of these
    Will I record the praises, making verse;
    Deal boldly with substantial things, in truth
    And sanctity of passion, speak of these
    That justice may be done, obeisance paid
    Where it is due.”

Much more might be said of his views of man, as they ultimately became,
for his insight into the heart and its workings, though confined to
certain lines, and reflective, not dramatic, was within these lines true
and deep.

But we must now turn to consider, secondly, what were his views about
Nature, when they were fully matured. He now came to hold with conscious
conviction, what formerly he had only felt, hardly knowing that he felt
it, that Nature had

A self-subsistence, existing outside of man’s thoughts and feelings, and
wholly independent of them;

A unity of life and power pervading it through all its parts, and binding
them together into a living whole;

A true life of her own, which streamed through and stimulated his life—a
spirit which, itself invisible, spoke through visible things to his
spirit.

That this life had qualities inherent in it:—

Calmness, which stilled and refreshed man;

Sublimity, which raised him to noble and majestic thoughts;

Tenderness, which, while stirring in the largest and loftiest things,
condescends to the lowest, is with the humblest worm and weed as much as
in the great movements of the elements and of the stars.

Above all, Nature he now saw to be the shape and image of right reason,
reason in the highest sense, embodied and made visible in order, in
stability, in conformity to eternal law. The perception of these
satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his heart.

Thus the powers and impulses which converse with these qualities, as they
exist in the external work, had quickened within his boyish mind, now
once more in this reviving time asserted themselves, and filled him with
a happiness which, if soberer, was sanctioned by his mature reason. The
Universe therefore was to him no mere reverberation of his own voice, no
mere reflection of hues cast from his own changeful moods. It was not
a thing to practice the pathetic fallacy on. It was not true that, as
Coleridge dreamed,

    “Ours is the wedding garment, ours the shroud.”

Not this at all, but an existence independent of us and our moods,
stable, equable, serene. And our wisdom is to receive her native impulses
without imposing on her our caprices. Hence it is that Nature is to man a
supporting, calming, cooling, and invigorating power. So it was that at
this time he felt both emotion and calmness come to him from Nature, from
the one energy to seek the truth, from the other that happy stillness
which fits the mind to receive truth when it comes unsought. With clearer
conviction than ever, he now saw in Nature a power, which is the shape
and image of right reason—reason, in its highest sense, embodied and
made visible. The order, the stability, “the calm obedience to eternal
law,”—these, as I have just said, which are the image of right reason,
satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his feelings. From Nature’s
calmness, and from her slow and steadily-working processes, he received
an admonition to cease from hoping to see man regenerated by sudden and
violent convulsions, and yet to esteem and reverence what is permanent in
human affection, and in man’s moral being, and to build his hope on the
gradual expansion and purification of these. All these perceptions about
Nature had been more or less present to him from boyhood, only now what
were before but vague emotions came out as settled convictions.

But there was a further step, which he now made. He discovered that
in order to attain the highest and truest vision of Nature, the soul
of man must not be altogether passive, but must act along with and in
unison with Nature, must send from itself abroad an emanation, which,
meeting with natural objects, produces something better than either the
soul itself or Nature by herself could generate. This creation is, as
has been observed, “partly given by the object, partly by the poet’s
mind,” is neither wholly mind, nor wholly object, but something, call it
aspect, effluence, emanation, which partakes of both. It is the meeting
or marriage of the life that is in the soul with the life that is in the
Universe, which two are akin to each other, that produces the truest
vision and the highest poetry. This view Wordsworth illustrates by the
marvelous effect produced on a landscape by a change in the atmosphere,
a clearing of the clouds, a sudden flood of moonlight let down into the
darkness of mountain abysses, such as that he saw at midnight while
ascending Snowdon. A like power he thinks the mind can exercise on
outward things—what he calls

                      “An ennobling interchange
    Of action from without and from within.
    The excellence, pure function, and best power,
    Both of the object seen and eye that sees.”

When his mind thus put forth its higher power on the actual familiar
world, on life’s every-day appearances, he seemed to gain clear sight
of a new world, not hitherto reflected in books, but worthy to be so
reflected, and made visible to other eyes. This he set himself to
accomplish, and the result still lives in many a pure and deathless
creation. That combined action of the object seen and of the eye that
saw, above spoken of, is especially embodied in such poems as “The
Yew-Trees of Borrowdale,” “Stepping Westward,” “The Leech-Gatherer,” and
“To the Cuckoo.” In all these, and many more, the poet, letting his own
spirit pass forth into the scene before him, and become identified with
it, has caught the inner spirit of the place and of the hour, brought it
out, and interpreted it as no mere outward description could have done.
A few strokes, giving one or two of the most characteristic features, as
seen by a keenly-observant eye, and then he glides into that which no eye
can see, but only the living power of a deep and sympathetic imagination.
And though few other imaginations could have penetrated so deeply into
the secret of Nature, and given articulate voice to her silences, yet
every true imagination feels at once that he had gone to the quick, and
truly rendered the invisible but not unfelt presence that dwells there.
It is in this way that he has gathered up into himself the sleep that
from oldest time has brooded over those Westmoreland mountains, and
uttered it in his own perfect and melodious language. This has been done
by him for that region once for all, and no other poet need attempt to
repeat it, any more than a sculptor need essay another Apollo Belvedere,
or a painter a new Transfiguration.

On many of the poems descriptive of Nature that followed his recovery
from despondency,—that is, those composed between the years 1796 and
1808,—there rests an ethereal gleam, something of

    “The light that never was on sea or land,”

which gives to these a peculiar charm, but which is less present in
his later productions. This idealizing light was drawn either from
remembrances of that dream-like vividness and splendor above noticed,
which in childhood he saw resting on all things, or from occasional
returns of the same vivid emotion and quick flashings from within, which
his restored happiness in Nature for a time brought back. This peculiar
light culminates in the “Ode on Immortality,” though there it is rather
a remembrance of something gone than a present possession. Perhaps the
last powerful recurrence of this visionary gleam which he felt is that
recorded in the lines composed upon “An Evening of Extraordinary Beauty
and Splendor,” seen from the little mount in front of his Rydal home in
the year 1818.[17]

But these high instincts, and all the impulses akin to them, what are
they, what is their worth and meaning, what are we to think about them?
Are they merely erratic flashes, garnishing for a moment our sky in early
years, soon to be lost forever in the gray light of common day? This is
the way in which most poets have regarded them, and so they have sung
many a sad depressing strain over the vanished illusions of youth. But
this was not the way with Wordsworth. Mr. Leslie Stephens, in a recent
essay of great value, has admirably pointed out how his whole philosophy
is based on “the identity between the instincts of our childhood and
our enlightened reason,” and is busied with expounding the process by
which “our early intuitions may be transformed into settled principles
of feeling and action.” Those vague instincts, Wordsworth believed,
come to man from a divine source, and are given to him not merely for
pleasure’s sake, but that he may condense them into permanent principles
by thought, by the faithful exercise of the affections, by contemplation
of Nature, and by high resolve. The outer world was best and most truly
seen when viewed, not as a solitary existence apart from man, but as the
background of human life, and looked at through the human emotions of
awe, reverence, and love. Thus, though those early ideal lights might
disappear, something else, as precious and more permanent, would be
wrought into character as the vague emotions became transmuted into what
he calls “intellectual love,” “feeling intellect,” “hopeful reason,” all
of which are but different names for that state of consciousness which he
held to be the organ or eye that sees all highest truth.

    “This spiritual love acts not nor exists
    Without imagination, which, in truth,
    Is but another name for absolute power
    And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
    And reason in her most exalted mood.”

It may be said, perhaps, This philosophy is all well enough for those
who have in childhood known such ideal experiences in the presence of
Nature. But these are the few; most men know nothing of them. Be it
so. But to these, too, this philosophy has a word to speak. If the many
have been insensible to Nature, most surely they have known the first
home affections, to father and mother, to brother and sister. In early
youth they have felt the warm glow of friendship, and later in life the
first domestic affections may have revived more deeply when manhood has
made for itself a second home. Of these emotions time must needs make
many of them past experiences. Are they then to be no more than fond
memories without influence on our present selves? Wordsworth teaches, and
all wise men agree with him, that if we allow these to pass from us, as
sunbeams from a hill-side, the character is lowered and worsened; if they
are retained in thought and melted into our being, they become the most
fruitful sources of ennobled character. The firm purpose not to

    “Break faith with those whom he has laid
    In earth’s dark chambers,”

—to how many a man has this become the chief incentive to perseverance in
high endeavor!

This is a philosophy which will wear. It suits not only the visionary
in his solitude, but is fitted as well for the counting-house and the
market-place.

Again, it may be said, This way of looking at Nature and life may suit a
man in the heyday of life, when his nerves are strong, his hopes high,
and all things wear their summer mood. In such a time he may well sing

    “Naught shall prevail against us or disturb
    Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
    Is full of blessings.”

No doubt, through “The Prelude,” and through all Wordsworth’s poetry
contemporary with it, that is, all his poetry composed before the age of
thirty-five, there runs a vein of Optimism. But a man’s views of life
are not complete at that age. Though he never expressly recanted any of
the views expressed in “The Prelude,” yet he added to them new elements
when time and grief showed him other sides of life. Hitherto, human
sorrow had been to him but a “still sad music” far away. But when, in
1805, Nature, with her night and tempest, drove his favorite brother’s
ship on the Shambles of Portland Head, and wrecked the life he greatly
loved, then he learned that she was not always serene, but could be stern
and cruel. Then sorrow came home to him, and entered into his inmost
soul. In that bereavement we find him writing—“Why have we sympathies
that make the best of us afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet
we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our
notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within
our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be his notion and
rule, if everything were to end here? Would it not be blasphemous to say
that ... we have more of love in our nature than He has? The thought
is monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition
of another and a better world, I do not see.” This is not the language
of a pantheist, as he has been often called, nor of an optimist, one
blind to the dark side of the world, as his poetry would sometimes make
us fancy him. From that time on, the sights and sounds of Nature took
to Wordsworth a soberer hue, a more solemn tone. The change of mood is
grandly expressed in the “Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle,”
where he says that he now could look no more on

    “A smiling sea, and be what I have been.”

Yet he gives way to no weak or selfish lamentation, but sets himself to
draw from the sorrow fortitude for himself, sympathy and tenderness for
others:—

    “Then welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
      And frequent sights of what is to be borne;
    Such sights, or worse, as are before me here;—
      Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”

That is manly and health-giving sorrow. It was his happiness, more than
of most men, to use all that came to him for the end it was meant for.
Early ideal influences from Nature, the first home affections, sorrows of
mature manhood—none of them were lost. All melted into him, and did their
part in educating his heart to a more feeling and tender wisdom. But they
could not have done this, they could not have so deepened and purified
him, had they not been received into a spirit based in firm faith on God,
from whom all these things came, whose purpose for himself and others
they subserved. This discipline of sorrow was increased when, a few years
after the loss of his brother, he laid in Grasmere church-yard two infant
children. Those trials of his home affections sank deep into him,—more
and more humanized his spirit, and made him feel more distinctly the
power of those Christian faiths which, though never denied by him, were
present in his early poems rather as a latent atmosphere of sentiment
than as expressed beliefs. It cannot be denied that in his pure, but
perhaps too confident youth, the Naturalistic spirit, so to call it, is
stronger in his poetry than the Christian. He expected more from the
teaching of Nature, combined with the moral intuitions of his soul, than
these in themselves, and unaided, can give. He did not enough see that
man needs other supports than these for the trials he has to endure. This
is not a matter of positive assertion or of positive denial,—rather of
comparative emphasis and proportion. We may say that the Christian view
of life and Nature does not at first receive the prominence which is its
due. But under the pressure of sorrow, and the sense of his own weakness,
he more and more turned to the Christian consolations. This change was
a very gradual one, and he has left no direct record of it. Only it is
perceptible here and there in his later poems, and, what is most to our
purpose, it colors the eye with which he looked on Nature. This cannot,
perhaps, better be illustrated than by comparing two poems composed in
the same region at an interval of thirty years. In 1803, in his buoyant
youth, during an evening walk by the shores of Loch Katrine, with his
face toward a glowing sunset, he composed the exquisite lines “Stepping
Westward,” in which the scene around him and a chance word addressed to
him suggested

                              “The thought
    Of traveling through the world that lay
    Before me in my endless way.”

In the autumn of 1831, when he was in his sixty-second year, he again
passed through the Trossachs, and this was the sentiment that then arose
within him. It may, as he himself suggests, have been colored by the
remembrance of his recent parting with Sir Walter Scott and the thought
of his decay, but it is altogether in keeping with his own habitual mood
at that time—

    “There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,
    But were an apt confessional for one
    Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone,
    That life is but a tale of morning grass
    Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
    That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
    Feed it, ’mid Nature’s old felicities,
    Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
    Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy quest.
    If from a golden perch of aspen spray
    (October’s workmanship to rival May),
    The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast,
    That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay,
    Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest.”

There is another poem of the same date, 1831, which, though it is
seldom quoted, shall be given here in full, since it well illustrates
Wordsworth’s later phase of feeling about natural objects. It is entitled
“The Primrose of the Rock,” and refers to a rock which stands on the
right hand, a little way up the middle road leading from Rydal to
Grasmere:—

    “A Rock there is whose homely front
      The passing traveler slights;
    Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps,
      Like stars, at various heights;
    And one coy Primrose to that Rock
      The vernal breeze invites.

    “What hideous warfare hath been waged,
      What kingdoms overthrown,
    Since first I spied that Primrose-tuft,
      And marked it for my own;
    A lasting link in Nature’s chain
      From highest heaven let down!

    “The flowers, still faithful to the stems,
      Their fellowship renew;
    These stems are faithful to the root
      That worketh out of view;
    And to the rock the root adheres
      In every fibre true.

    “Close clings to earth the living rock
      Though threatening still to fall;
    The earth is constant to her sphere;
      And God upholds them all:
    So blooms this lonely Plant, nor fears
      Her annual funeral.

    “Here closed the meditative strain,
    But air breathed soft that day,
      The hoary mountain-heights were cheered.
    The sunny vale looked gay,
      And to the Primrose of the Rock
    I gave this after-lay.

    “I sang—Let myriads of bright flowers,
      Like thee, in field and grove
    Revive unenvied; mightier far,
      Than tremblings that reprove
    Our vernal tendencies to hope
      Is God’s redeeming love;

    “That love which changed—for wan disease,
      For sorrow that had bent
    O’er hopeless dust—for withered age—
      Their moral element,
    And turned the thistles of a curse
      To types beneficent.

    “Sin-blighted though we are, we too,
      The reasoning Sons of Men,
    From our oblivious winter called
      Shall rise, and breathe again,
    And in eternal summer lose
      Our threescore years and ten.

    “To humbleness of hearts descends
      This prescience from on high
    The faith that elevates the just,
      Before and when we die,
    And makes each soul a separate heaven,
      A court for Deity.”

Is not this more in keeping with the whole of Nature, more true to human
life in all its aspects, than poetry which dwells merely on the bright
and cheerful side of things? If Nature has its vernal freshness, and
its “high midsummer pomps,” has it not as well autumnal decay, bleakness
of winter, and dreary visitations of blighting east wind? What are we to
make of these? Are not suffering and death forever going on throughout
animated creation? What meaning are we to attach to this? As for man, if
he has his day of youth and strength and success, what are we to say of
failure, disappointment, bereavement, and life’s swift decay? This last,
the dark and forlorn side of things, is as real as the bright side. How
are we to interpret it? Surely, without attempting any theory which will
explain it, nothing is more in keeping with these manifold and seemingly
conflicting aspects of life than the faith that He who made and upholds
the Universe does not keep coldly aloof, gazing from a distance on the
sufferings of his creatures, but has himself entered into the conflict,
has himself become the great Sufferer, the great Bearer of all wrong, and
is working out for his creatures some better issue through a redemptive
sorrow which is Divine. Such a faith, though it does not explain the ills
of life, gives them another meaning, and helps men to bear them as no
other can. This view of suffering, latent in much of Wordsworth’s poetry,
if not fully uttered, at last found full expression in these, which are
among his latest lines.

No doubt this, and the few other meditative poems, composed in the same
strain at that later day, have not the magic charm, the ethereal beauty,
of those songs sung in buoyant youth, when before the transfiguring power
of his imagination the earth appeared to be

    “An unsubstantial faery place.”

That passed with youth, and could not return; but another sedater, more
moralizing, yet sweetly gracious mood came on,—a mood which is in keeping
with that earlier, its natural product representative in one, whose days
and whose moods were as he himself wished them to be, “linked each to
each by natural piety.” As there is in character a grace that becomes
every age, so there is a poetry. And Wordsworth’s later expressions about
Nature and life are, I venture to think, as becoming in an old man,
matured by much experience and by sorrow, as his earlier more ideal poems
became a young man just restored from a great mental crisis, but still
with youth on his side. If the poems of the maturer age lost something
that belonged to the earlier ones, they also gained new elements,—they
contain words which are a support amid the stress of life, and a
benediction for its decline.

There were many who knew Wordsworth’s poetry well while he was still
alive, who felt its power, and the new light which it threw on the
material world. But though they half-guessed they did not fully know the
secret of it. They got glimpses of part, but could not grasp the whole
of the philosophy on which it was based But when, after his death, “The
Prelude” was published, they were let into the secret, they saw the
hidden foundations on which it rests, as they had never seen them before.
The smaller poems were more beautiful, more delightful, but “The Prelude”
revealed the secret of their beauty. It showed that all Wordsworth’s
impassioned feeling towards Nature was no mere fantastic dream, but based
on sanity, on a most assured and reasonable philosophy. It was as though
one who had been long gazing on some building grand and fair, admiring
the vast sweep of its walls, and the strength of its battlements, without
understanding their principle of coherence, were at length to be admitted
inside by the master builder, and given a view of the whole plan from
within, the principles of the architecture, and the hidden substructures
on which it was built. This is what “The Prelude” does for the rest of
Wordsworth’s poetry.

For all his later phases of thought, all that followed the republicanism
of “The Prelude,” Wordsworth, I know, has been well abused. Shelley
bemoaned him, Mr. Browning has flouted him, and following these all the
smaller fry of Liberalism have snarled at his heels. But all his changes
of thought are self-consistent, and if fairly judged, the good faith
and wisdom of them all can well be justified. For a few years during
the Revolution he had hoped for a sudden regeneration from that great
catastrophe. He found himself deceived, and gradually unlearnt the
fallacies whence that deception had sprung. He ceased to look for the
improvement of mankind from violent convulsions. Neither did he expect
much from gradual political change, nor from those formalities which
we nickname education, not from a revised code and payment by results,
not from these nor from any outward machinery. But he hoped much from
whatever helps forward the growth, the expanding, and the deepening, in
all the grades of men, of the “feeling soul,” by which they may become
more sensitive to the face of Nature, more sensitive towards their
fellow-men and the lower creatures, and more open to influences which
are directly divine. In these things he believed, for these he wrought
consistently, till his task was done.

I have dwelt thus fully on the growth of Wordsworth’s character, the
moral discipline through which he passed, and the ultimate maturity of
soul to which he attained, in order that we may understand his doctrine
regarding Nature. He held that it was only through the soul that the
outer world is rightly apprehended—only when it is contemplated through
the human emotions of admiration, awe, and love. This he held all his
life through. But yet in his way of dealing with Nature, taken as a
whole, we shall not be wrong if we note two different, though not
conflicting, phases. In his earlier poetic period he was mainly absorbed
in the unity and large livingness of Nature—in feeling and interpreting
the life that is in each individual thing, as well as in the whole, in
substituting for a mere machine,—a universe of death,—one which

            “Moves with light, and light informed,
    Actual, divine, and true.”

In doing this it is not too much to say that his poetry is the most
powerful protest which English literature contains against the views
of the world engendered by a mechanical deism—the best witness to the
spiritual element that exists both in Nature and in man. Nor less is it
our surest antidote to the exclusively analytic and microscopic view of
Nature, so tyrannous over present thought, the end of which is universal
disintegration. This was the work he did when he worked more in his
earlier, what has been called, his naturalistic vein.

In his later period the moral tendency became predominant, not that it
had ever been absent from his thought. Even at a comparatively early time
he had been wont to take the sights and sounds of the sensible world
as symbols and correspondences of the invisible. In 1806, hearing the
cuckoo’s voice echo from Nab-scar, as he walked on the opposite side of
Rydal Mere, he exclaimed:—

    “Have not we too? yes, we have
      Answers and we know not whence
    Echoes from beyond the grave,
      Recognized intelligence!

    “Often as thy inward ear
      Catches such rebounds, beware—
    Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
      For of God—of God they are.”

Again, in that Evening ode composed in 1818, to which reference has been
already made, as he gazes on

          “The silent spectacle—the gleam—
    The shadow—and the peace supreme,”

he exclaims—

    “Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,
    And see to what fair countries ye are bound!”

In his latest phase, as seen in the two poems of 1831, quoted above, the
moral has so overpowered the naturalistic mood that this spiritualizing
of all Nature into symbols of things unseen is rather obviously obtruded
than delicately hinted. However this may be, to do this, to treat Nature
in this way, so to interpret it that it shall touch the moral heart of
the most thoughtful and apprehensive men—this is one of the two highest
functions of inspired Poetry. And in the exercise of this function, too,
Wordsworth has taught us much.

       *       *       *       *       *

It would be interesting to continue this investigation, and to trace
the different phases of the great movement towards Nature, as it
manifests itself in the poets who were Wordsworth’s contemporaries,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott, and Keble; and in the poets of the present
generation, and in other writers still living, who in prose works
have treated of æsthetics. But to do so would require at least another
volume. With Wordsworth, however, as the great leader of that movement,
one may, with propriety, pause for the present. For however various and
interesting have been the aspects of Nature that have been presented by
his contemporaries, or by more recent poets, none of them has rendered
those aspects he has essayed more truly, broadly, and penetratingly. And
Wordsworth alone, adding the philosopher to the poet, has speculated
widely and deeply on the relation in which Nature stands, to the soul
of man, and on the truths suggested by this relation. In that relation,
and along the lines of thought that radiate from it, is to be found the
true interpretation of Nature—that interpretation which man still craves,
after Science has said its last word. This interpretation, however, is
a truth which can only be apprehended by the moral imagination, that
is, the imagination filled with moral light, and which will commend
itself only to the most thoughtful men in their most feeling moods. It
is not likely ever to be vindicated by logical processes, or tabulated
in scientific registers. Not the less for that is it a vital truth,
attesting itself, as all vital truths do, by the harmony it brings into
all our thoughts—by the response it finds in the inner man.



FOOTNOTES


[1] _Quarterly Review_, October, 1870, pp. 143, 144.

[2] Wordsworth, Preface to Second Edition of _Lyrical Ballads_.

[3] Myosotis Alpestris.

[4] S. T. Coleridge, _Lit. Biog._ vol. ii. p. 23.

[5] Since writing the above passage, I have been pleased to find in
Mr. Hamerton’s _Sylvan Year_, the following passage, which expresses
more fully the same thought. He speaks (page 68) of “the delight of the
citizen in green leaves, and the intensity of sensation about Nature
which we find in poets who were bred in towns; whilst those who have
lived much in the country, though they know and observe more, seem to
feel more equably, and to go to Nature with less of sensuous thirst and
excitement.”

[6] _Life of Sir Isaac Newton_, by Sir David Brewster, vol. ii. pp. 407,
408.

[7] Mozley’s _University Sermons_, p. 141.

[8] See Müller’s _Lectures on Language_, 2d series, pp. 435, 436.

[9] Miss Wordsworth, p. 228.

[10] Essay on Keble.

[11] _Trench on Parables_, p. 13.

[12] Born 1621, died 1695.

[13] Dawson, _Nature and the Bible_, pp. 23, 24.

[14] Odyssey, B. vii. 112; Worsley, B. vii. 17th stanza.

[15] To this assertion I must make one exception. Since these remarks
were written, my attention has been kindly drawn by Professor Campbell of
St. Andrews to a passage in the ninth book of _Paradise Lost_, in which
Milton for a moment reverts to the old rural freshness in something of
the manner of his youth. It is the place where the Tempter first catches
sight of Eve:—

    “Much he the place admired, the person more.
    As one who long in populous city pent,
    Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
    Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
    Among the pleasant villages and farms
    Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
    The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
    Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
    If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
    What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more,
    She most, and in her look seems all delight:
    Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
    This flowery flat, the sweet recess of Eve
    Thus early, thus alone.”

[16] From Dr. Clerk’s new translation of Ossian.

[17] How greatly to be desired is an edition of Wordsworth’s entire
works, in which the poems should be printed in the exact chronological
order of their composition, along with those notes on them which the
poet dictated late in life. Such an arrangement of them is absolutely
essential to a right understanding of their meaning, and those who desire
to attain such an understanding are obliged to make the chronological
arrangement for themselves, at great trouble, and at best very
imperfectly. The time when such an edition can be made, with the fullest
means for accuracy, is fast passing, if it is not already past. Is there
no hope that those in whose hands the thing lies will still render this
great and much-needed service to the great poet’s memory?



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