CHAPTER II
INDICATIONS OF A NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE IN THE POETRY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In this chapter the method of work is quite unlike that in the preceding study. The typical and the dominant are not regarded. Attention is rather converged upon the significant exception. We are led into nooks and corners and byways. The most famous author is not necessarily the one on whom emphasis is placed. In searching for legitimate proof of a tendency we may safely turn to the work of men of unoriginal genius and moderate power. A study of this sort would certainly give a distorted view if it were for a moment thought to represent the period as a whole. But if it is held in mind that the attitude toward Nature was in general through the eighteenth century marked by indifference and artificiality, we may throw as high lights as we please on the exceptions. This study will serve its purpose if, in its following-out of the complexities and inconsistencies that make a transition period interesting, it shall succeed in showing that, along with the classical feeling toward Nature, there was also a real and vital love for the out-door world, and that this new attitude toward Nature is marked by first-hand observation, by artistic sensitiveness to beauty, by personal enthusiasm for Nature, by a recognition of the effect of Nature on man, and, occasionally, by an imaginative conception of Nature somewhat in the Wordsworthian sense.
The new attitude toward Nature, of which Thomson is the first adequate exponent, finds occasional and not ineffective expression during the two decades before the publication of “Winter” in 1726. In the works of John Philips (1676-1709), Ambrose Philips (1675–1749), Lady Winchilsea (1661–1720), John Gay (1685–1732), Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), William Pattison (1706–1727), Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), Robert Riccaltoun (1691–1769), and Dr. Armstrong (1709–1779), we become more or less definitely aware of a new outlook on the external world.
Dr. Johnson praised John Philips’ poem “Cyder”[199] because it had the “peculiar merit” of being “grounded in truth.” On the whole this poem is of the didactic classical order, but here and there among the minutely accurate horticultural precepts we come upon indications that the poet was not insensible to the charms of Nature in other than its utilitarian aspects. His delight in color may be seen from his specific descriptions of apples. The pippin is “burnish’d o’er with gold;” the red-streak “with gold irradiate and vermilion shines.” “Plumbs” are “sky-dyed.” He notes the “Ore, Azure, Gules,” and the blending of colors in the rainbow. He observes the contrast between fields yellow with grain, and green pasture land. And he sees the colored edges of clouds when the sun breaks through. There is also apparent a sensitiveness to odors. He speaks of cowslip-posies “faintly sweet,” of odorous herbs, of the fragrance of apples on a dewy autumn morning, and of “the perfuming flowery bean.” Mr. Shairp credits Thomson with being the first poet to mention the fragrance of the bean fields,[200] but Philips is at least twenty years ahead of Thomson in noting this fact.
We see further indication of Philips’ enjoyment of Nature in a few lines,
Nor are the hills unamiable, whose tops To heaven aspire, affording prospect sweet To human ken,[201]
which were perhaps the earliest expression in the eighteenth century of that pleasure in high hills and wide prospects that was so marked a characteristic of later poetry. Philips’ explanation of the satisfaction he found in an early morning walk, namely, that the mind perplexed with irksome thought is calmed by the influence of Nature,[202] seems like a prophecy of the thought afterward dominant concerning man’s indebtedness to Nature.
In Ambrose Philips’ “Pastorals” we find a mingling of first-hand observation and classical imitation. His references to the ancients, his amoebean contests, the supposed effect of the death of Albino on the external world, the emphasis on dangers from heat and the nightly wolf, the frequent use of cumulative comparisons,[203] and, in general, the form of his “Pastorals,” show how closely he was held by conventional ideas. Furthermore, his facile use of Nature is always determined by his attitude toward some pastoral nymph or swain. He rejoices to paint an idyllic background for some Rosalind. He heaps up images from Nature to express the amorous praises of some Colinet. He has no conception of a relation between man and Nature more intimate than the highly artificial one of his “Pastorals.” What is of importance in his poetry is the fact that in the midst of his imitations and conventionalities are many true and charming observations drawn entirely from English country life and not found in earlier eighteenth-century poetry. His work is, to be sure, rendered weak and childish by two unpleasant mannerisms in diction: his use of adjectives ending in “y,” as “bloomy,” “dampy,” “bluey,” “steepy,” “purply,” and so on, and his use of diminutives such as “kidlings,” “lambkins,” “younglings,” “firstlings,” and “steerlings.” But on the whole we find in his poems a more full and accurate knowledge of Nature than is at all common in the poetry of the time. He notes the fleeting, dusky shadows cast by moving clouds, the glossiness of plums, the blue color of mists, the sweet odors of morning, the moaning of the night wind in the grove, the sportive chase of swallows, the loud note of the cuckoo, the speckled breast of the thrush, and the song of the blackbird “fluting through his yellow bill.” He usually calls flowers, trees, birds, and other animals by their specific names, and he seldom extends his list beyond his own probable observation. That Philips had a genuine love for Nature in her milder forms is further seen from the preface to his “Pastorals.” “As in Painting,” he says, “so in Poetry, the country affords not only the most delightful scenes and prospects, but likewise the most pleasing images of life.” He loved the songs of birds because the “sedate and quiet harmony” of their simple strains gives “a sweet and gentle composure to the mind.” And he was conscious of an “unspeakable sort of satisfaction” when he saw “a little country-dwelling, advantageously situated amidst a beautiful variety of hills, meadows, fields, woods and rivulets.”
Lady Winchilsea is, in the study of the poetry of Nature, the most significant of the minor poets before Thomson. She was a friend of Rowe and Pope, and was honored by complimentary verses from them.[204] She is known now chiefly because of Wordsworth’s reference to her,[205] and through the poems published in Ward’s “English Poets.”[206] Three of the poems there given, “The Nightingale,” “The Tree,” “A Nocturnal Revery,” have to do with Nature. With these exceptions the eighty-one poems in the collection of 1713[207] are thoroughly classical in their form and spirit, though unmarked by any preponderance of artificial fancies. But these three short poems are remarkable productions when thought of in connection with their author’s poetical environment. They are the earliest eighteenth-century poems in which Nature is frankly chosen as the theme, and they show a personal knowledge that must have been the accumulated result of many experiences.
The observation in “The Nightingale” is especially truthful and sympathetic. That there is no attempt to describe the bird is an omission justified by the fact that the nightingale is seldom seen.[208] The two characteristics noted in the bird’s song are its exceeding sweetness and its sadness, or rather, its sense of pain.[209] A comparison of the phrases in the note will show that Lady Winchilsea listened with the hearing ear of a true poet. But we cannot fail to notice as well that the song is not fully heard or reported. In the other poets we find represented a richness, a fulness, an ecstasy, a tumult, not even hinted at in Lady Winchilsea’s poem.[210] Nor does she mention the passion most poets have heard in the song.[211] But however incomplete the impression received may have been, the poetical record of what was perceived is both truthful and vivid. She seems to write as she listens and the reader follows the variations of the song through their effect on her own mind.
In the fifty-two lines of the poem on Night twenty-two natural facts are recorded. Some of these would not escape the most careless, but only close observation would discover such details as the sleepy cowslip, the grass standing upright, the unusual strength of odors, the clearer sound of falling waters, the horse’s audible cropping of the grass, the waving moon seen in the stream, and the distant call of the curlew. Lady Winchilsea’s love of Nature was of the most unambitious sort. To have seen the stately tree, to have heard the nightingale, to know all she did about night, would not have called her beyond the gates of her own park. But her joy in Nature needed no strong or novel stimulus. It is her distinction that she had fixed an “exquisite regard” on the commonest facts of the external world, and that she spoke quite clearly and simply from her own life. Hence her knowledge had the new quality of being specific and local and accurately defined.
Still more noteworthy is Lady Winchilsea’s spiritual sensitiveness to Nature. Such a phrase as “the mysterious face of heaven” marks a new conception of the sky. Night is no longer “the parent of fears” but a time whose solemn quiet suggests a strange and subtle sense of something too high for syllables to speak. Nature is to her no mere background for human life. Man is influenced by Nature. His rage is disarmed. His spirit is led to feel a sedate content. And sometimes in moments of especial insight there is revealed to him in the inferior world an existence “like his own.” Not often before Wordsworth is there so distinct a prevision of his way of looking at Nature.[212]
In the slow turning of English poetry from the artificial to the natural John Gay was distinctly helpful, yet the reader of “Trivia,” “The Fan,” “The Epistles,” the “Fables,” and even the “Eclogues” would hardly suspect their author of knowing, in any close way, any life outside the city. It is only in “Rural Sports,” written when he was twenty-eight, and “The Shepherd’s Week,” when he was twenty-nine, that we find any real study of Nature. In “Rural Sports” hunting and especially fishing are described with the enthusiasm and technical accuracy of an expert. There is no hint of the feeling toward animals that made Thomson and Cowper abhor hunting. There is simply a thoroughly sportsmanlike knowledge of details, a sense of pleasurable excitement in the chase, and joy in victory. This delight in open-air pursuits is often far enough removed from any real love of Nature, and is here of much less significance than casual passages showing Gay’s love of the world about him. He tells us that it was his habit to take morning walks through the fields,[213] that at sunset he often strayed out to the cliffs near Barnstaple, and lingered to watch the glowing colors of the sunset, and the later beauty of an “unclouded sky” bright with stars and a silver moon that marked a glittering path along the sea.[214] Gay’s love of Nature was largely confined to the milder aspects, but he seems not to have been entirely indifferent to hills. In speaking of Cotton Hill in North Devonshire he said,
When its summit I climb, I then seem to be Just as if I approached nearer heaven! When with spirits depress’d to this hill I repair, My spirits then instantly rally; It was near this bless’d spot, I first drew vital air, So--a hill I prefer to a valley.[215]
In six or seven unimportant passages Gay speaks of hills or mountains, apparently using the words interchangeably, but not in a manner indicating much knowledge of them. Yet such little pictures as that of the dawn when the sun “strikes the distant eastern hills with light,” or that of “the evening star shining above the western hill,” show some recognition of hills as an attractive part of a landscape. Gay knows flowers and birds and trees with some definiteness. He speaks of many domestic animals. He notes colors and odors.[216] He observes the lengthened shadows stretched across the meadows in the late afternoon, the long flight of crows seeking the wood at sunset, the streams “wrinkled”[217] by a fresh breeze, the yellow showers of leaves in autumn. Abundant and varied as is this use of Nature, it is not marked by especial delicacy of feeling or accuracy of observation. But for all that “The Shepherd’s Week” is a notable piece of work, and it is in these pastorals that we find Gay’s real service. Whether meant as a friendly aid in Pope’s castigation of Ambrose Philips or not, these poems were unquestionably meant as a good-humored satire on pastorals that ventured to deal truthfully with English rustic life. The Latin form was counted the ideal one for pastoral. To this form Gay held, evidently with the conscious purpose of suggesting the Latin at every turn. Then he filled in this mold with the homeliest, most realistic details of English country life.[218] The plain, practical truth of these details is simply amazing as will be seen from the passages indicated in the note. See also the flowers brought in, the primrose, kingcup, clover, daisie, gilliflower, mary-gold, butter-flowers, cowslip, and others; and the animals, the witless lamb, frisking kid, udder’d cow, clucking hen, waddling goose, squeaking pigs, worrying cur, whining swine, paddling ducks, guzzling hogs, and others; and the country sports, as romping in the fields, blindman’s buff, hot cockles, swinging, and others.[219] In Pastoral IV is an assemblage of curious country superstitions; in Pastoral I are given signs of rain; in Pastoral V are funeral customs; and in Pastoral VI an account of the favorite country songs. These poems are a veritable treasure-house for the student of folklore. They might also serve as a diary of country occupations. Take for example Bumkinet’s reminiscences of Blouzelinda’s life in Pastoral V. In such a wood, he remembers, they gathered fagots. There he drew down hazel boughs and stuffed her apron with brown nuts. In another place he had helped her hunt for her strayed hogs, and as they drove the untoward creatures to the sty had seized the opportunity to tell his love. At the dairy he had often seen her making butter pats, or feeding with floods of whey the hogs that crowded to the door. In the barn as he plied the flail, he had watched her sift out food for the hens. In the field she had ranged the sheaves as he pitched them on the growing mow. The object of these pastorals was to show the absurd incongruity between the Latin form with its suggestions of Arcadian days, and the roughness of English country life. The result was unexpected. Readers in general, indifferent to scholarly congruities, were delighted with the novelty, the air of freshness and truth, in the pictures scattered through the “Pastorals.” Poetry had suddenly and without meaning to do it, gone from the city and the park to the very plainest and most matter-of-fact sort of country people and country occupations, and had somehow made them attractive. Blouzelinda and Buxoma are not in the same order of beings as the traditional Phyllis and Chloris, and they are equally far removed from the vulgar repulsive country wenches in Swift’s coarse satires. They are real beings with a charm of their own, and the love they inspire in Lobbin Clout and Cuddy is an everyday, quite comprehensible affair.
The dirge for Blouzelinda indicates well the covert laugh with which Gay wrote these descriptions of country life. The clergyman said
that Heaven would take her soul, no doubt, And spoke the hour-glass in her praise--quite out.
After the funeral the men trudged
homeward to her mother’s farm, To drink new cyder mull’d, with ginger warm, For gaffer Tread-well told us, by the by, “Excessive sorrow is exceeding dry.”
This sense of fun is everywhere apparent, and shows how unwittingly Gay broke a lance in a new cause. Yet some parts of his Preface are startlingly modern in their plea for truth to Nature. Here is a passage which, so far as its spirit is concerned, might have been said by either Crabbe or Wordsworth.
Thou wilt not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or, if the hogs are astray, driving them to the styes. My shepherd gathereth none other nosegays but what are the growth of our own fields; he sleepeth not under myrtle shades, but under a hedge; nor doth he vigilantly defend his flock from wolves for there are none.
Whatever Gay meant to do, he really did accomplish what his Preface states as his aim. He turned poetry away from the “insipid delicacy” of the conventional pastoral, and truthfully represented the “plain downright hearty cleanly folk” of rustic England. And external Nature, though nowhere dwelt upon for its own sake, is everywhere present and so vividly portrayed, that the reader had what was certainly a poetic novelty at that day, “a lively landscape of his own country, just as he might have seen it, if he had taken a walk in the fields at the proper season.”
The use of external Nature in Parnell’s poems has narrow limits. There is no mention of winter, autumn, or summer. Mountains are merely noted in passing as disagreeable features in the poet’s dreary surroundings in Ireland. There is but one line about the sea. Wild scenery of whatever sort is ignored. The only storm is described in some conventional lines in “The Hermit.” There is almost no record of specific knowledge of trees, or flowers, or birds. There are few indications of openness to sensuous impressions from specific forms, colors, odors, sounds. But in spite of these widely inclusive negations, Parnell is of distinct importance as a poet of Nature. He has, to begin with, some accurate first-hand observation. He speaks once of the “differing green” of trees in spring. He describes a fern with some minuteness. There are two charming descriptions of banks and skies reflected in clear water.[220] Other fresh observations are,
Now early shepherds o’er the meadow pass And print long footsteps in the glittering grass.[221]
When in the river cows for coolness stand And sheep for breezes seek the lofty land;[222]
or this of the close of a storm,
But now the clouds in airy tumult fly; The sun emerging opes an azure sky; A fresher green the smelling leaves display, And, glittering as they tremble, cheer the day.[223]
Such lines are of value for they indicate, though they are few in number, some power of direct vision and of restrained, simple expression.
Parnell’s distinctive excellence is, however, along different lines. He records not facts but impressions. He is essentially a poet of the spring; he felt intensely all the glad, abundant life of the early year. But there is not a description of spring in his poems. He gives instead curiously happy descriptive touches that suggest far more than they say.
Note such lines as,
When spring came on with fresh delight,[224]
or
Green was her robe, and green her wreath, Wher-e’er she trod ’twas green beneath,[225]
or
The planted lanes rejoice with dancing leaves.[226]
There is a lilt in such lines, a joyousness, an off-hand certainty of touch, not in keeping with the customary cold and labored descriptions of spring.
Of still greater significance is Parnell’s literary use of Nature. In the “Night Piece” the external scene serves as an appropriate background for the thought presented. The few natural facts are so well chosen and so delicately touched that all the moral reflections seem permeated with an appropriate out-of-doors atmosphere. The calm, perfect beauty of the picture of night with its closing suggestions of mystery and sadness, the fading of the pale moon, and the sounds that come over the long lake, fit exactly the course of the poet’s melancholy meditation and contribute to it. The gay, light pictures in the “Hymn to Contentment” are equally well suited to the spirit of joyous praise with which that poem concludes.
Bishop Jebb has pointed out for the enjoyment of the “classical and pious reader” the similarity between the moral reflections in this poem and those in Cardinal Bona’s “Divina Psalmodia.”[227] Parnell’s close adherence to the thought of the cardinal in the didactic part of the poem, and the fact that the last forty-two lines, the ones that deal with Nature, are entirely Parnell’s own, give striking proof of the originality of his thought concerning the external world and its power over the human heart. It is in these lines that we find his most subtly suggestive conception of Nature. He represents himself as sad at heart. He seeks contentment in earthly pomp, in the paths of knowledge, in solitary search after diverting scenes in Nature, but in vain. At last he goes to a wood, and as he yields himself to the influence of the place becomes suddenly aware that in this quiet spot the true spirit of contentment is speaking to him wise lessons of self-control and communion with God. In gratitude for the joy that has come to him through Nature he utters a song of praise to the “source of all Nature,” but as he looks about him on the glad world, he feels that his song is merely an expression in words of the great chorus of thanksgiving going always silently up from sun and moon and stars, from seas, woods, and streams.
Such work as this is indeed remarkable before 1713; and for spirituality and insight, for what has well been called “a sense of the thing behind the thing,” it was many years before it was paralleled.
“The Morning Contemplation” is the only one of Pattison’s poems that has much to do with Nature. It was written, his friend tells us, on the banks of a river where the young poet used to wander, endeavoring to attune his verses to the smoothness and harmony of the stream. He was especially sensitive to the “sadly pleasing melancholy” of moonlight nights and solitary walks, and he was one of the first poets to express a longing for solitude with Nature. Gilded rooms of state, the purple slavery of towns, rob him of the bliss he finds in the living forest. When alone in the spacious fields he thinks himself almost a god. Even little scrubby thorns are to him more pleasing objects than courts can show. Nature charms his senses and soothes his soul; she is his best teacher, and he trusts her plain instructions.
Tell me, all ye mighty wise, Ye governors of colleges; What deeper wisdom can you know Than easy nature’s works here show,
reads like a crude prevision of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.” The “excellent morality” of “The Morning Contemplation” is much in the vein of Dyer’s “Grongar Hill.” Every fact in Nature arouses some thought or some emotion. By contrast or analogy it suggests human life, as in the lines,
See this river as it goes, With what eloquence it flows;
* * * * *
Believe me, life’s the very same, The very image of this stream.
Pattison’s poem is of real importance, because its early date[228] ranks it as probably the first of the eighteenth-century poems that treat of Nature in the romantic, sentimental, fervid fashion afterward brought to its culmination by the Wartons.
Allan Ramsay’s education was of the most limited sort, so that, in early life at least, the development of his genius was unbiased by a knowledge of Latin and Greek or even English models. After he was fifteen he lived in Edinburgh and there began to be infected by the pseudo-classicism of his day. The poems in which country scenes and people were most fully represented were, however, pretty clear and unadulterated records of his early experiences in the secluded mountainous district of Lanarkshire where he was brought up. The best poems of this sort are the pastoral dialogues, “Patie and Roger,” 1721, and “Jenny and Meggy,” 1723, or rather, “The Gentle Shepherd,” 1725, which is a combination of the two pastorals thrown into completer dramatic form. A second edition of “The Gentle Shepherd” appeared in the same year as Thomson’s “Winter.”[229] It is worthy of note that the service rendered by Gay to English poetry is in many respects paralleled by Allan Ramsay’s contributions to Scottish song. There are in Ramsay’s pastorals similar closely studied scenes from peasant life, wherein are minutely described the superstitions,[230] the household customs,[231] the out-door occupations,[232] the trials,[233] and the pleasures[234] of the homely folk among the hills of Scotland. But there are important differences. What Gay did lightly and without serious intent was with Ramsay a service of love. He was not laughing in his sleeve at the very truth he so capitally portrayed. Throughout his work there is, in general, an air of sincerity. It is as if Gay wrote from the point of view of an outsider with an unfailingly keen eye, and a quick sense of humor. But Ramsay wrote from a life that he had known and loved, and that he thoroughly respected.[235] There are occasional false notes in his pastorals. He gives his shepherds flutes and reeds; his comparisons, especially his cumulative similes, are conventional; he makes rather stiff use of personification; and his desire to make his hero and heroine well born interferes with the pastoral simplicity of the drama. But these are extraneous and hardly affect the real texture of the work.
We find in Ramsay’s poems occasional hints that his presentation of homely Scottish scenes and people was not merely instinctive, but that it was in some measure a deliberate choice. In “Tartana,” written in 1721, he said that his chosen muses were those that wandered through the clover meadows and the groves along the smooth meandering Tweed or by the gentle Tay, or where the haughty Clyde roared over lofty cataracts.
Phoebus, and his imaginary nine With me have lost the title of divine; To no such shadows will I homage pay, These to my real muses shall give way.
And again, protesting against the narrowness of poetic rules and customs, he said,
With more of Nature than of art From stated rules I often start,-- Rules never studied yet by me. My muse is British, bold and free, And loves at large to frisk and bound,[236]
and he called a wide, wild garden where all sorts of plants grew in wanton confusion, a paradise made by Nature herself. Even more emphatic is his Preface to “The Evergreen” in 1724. In commendation of the poems he had collected he said,
The morning rises as she does in the _Scottish_ horizon. We are not carried to _Greece_ or _Italy_ for a shade, a Stream, or a Breeze.... I find not Fault with these Things, as they are in _Greece_ or _Italy_: But with a Northern Poet for fetching his Materials from these Places, in a Poem, of which his own Country is the Scene; as our _Hymners_ to the _Spring_ and _Makers of Pastorals_ frequently do.
Ramsay’s use of external Nature is more charming than Gay’s. Scottish poetry had never, in its attitude toward the out-door world, passed through so barren and arid a period as that of the pseudo-classicism in England, nor had the Scottish people ever lost their sense of the beauty and especially of the mysterious power of glens and braes and burns. So Ramsay’s love of Nature was not without a considerable background in the way of national poetic spirit. He spoke out in fresh, true words what everybody knew, and described scenes familiar to every eye. There are, however, distinct limitations in Ramsay’s knowledge of Nature and his power of sympathetic representation. His recognition of colors is fresh and charming, but elementary, like that shown in ballads. “Caledonian hills are green,” “beneath a green shade,” “the simmer green,” “a green meadow,” “my native green plains,” are characteristic phrases.
When corn-riggs wav’d yellow, and blue heather bells,[237]
and
To pu’ the rashes green with roots sae white,[238]
are almost the only instances of any other color than green. Such phrases as “scented meadows,” “sweet scented rucks,” “new blown scents,” “sweetest briar,” “blooming fragrance,” show the same simple, undifferentiated recognition of odors. A few lines as,
How fast the westlin winds sough through the reeds,[239]
are more specific representations of sounds, but we do not often find words so discriminating. His references to trees, flowers, and birds are of the same general, limited sort. There are “bonny haughs” and “bonny woods;” there are rising plants, primroses, daisies, and gowans; there are “quiristers on high,” the merle, the mavis, and the lark. But there is no subtle, detailed observation. It is the open, frank, spontaneous joy of a child happy in the glad world about him. Ramsay’s best lines are descriptive of shining days, clear heavens, dancing streams. “The sun shines sweetly, a’ the lift looks blue,”[240] “ae shining day,” “ae clear morn of May,” “the morning shines,” “the lift’s unclouded blue,” “fair simmer mornings” indicate the general atmosphere of the scenery introduced. Occasional closer touches are seen in such lines as,
I’ve seen with shining fair the morning rise, And soon the fleecy clouds mirk a’ the skies,[241]
and
For yet the sun was wading thro’ the mist.[242]
Best of all are the lines about streams;
A trotting burnie wimpling through the ground Its channel pebbles, shining, smooth and round,[243]
A little fount Where water poplin springs.[244]
I’ve seen the silver spring a while rin clear And soon the mossy puddles disappear,[245]
Between twa birks out o’er a little lin The water fa’s and makes a singan din, A pool breast-deep, beneath, as clear as glass, Kisses with easy whirles the bord’ring grass,[246]
are descriptions almost perfect of their kind. In their beauty and freshness they show that the eye was on the object. Mr. Shairp says of Habbie’s How, “A pool in a burn among the Lowland Hills could hardly be more naturally described,” and one need not be a Scotchman to feel sure that the same is true of the minor descriptive touches.
Though Ramsay was brought up in a rugged part of Scotland, he seems to have had none of the modern feeling for mountains. But he speaks of “black, heathery mountains,” of “northern mountains clad with snow,” of “mountains clad with purple bloom,” and of hills that “smile with purple heather.” Once he exclaims,
Look up to Pentland’s tow’ring top. Buried beneath great wreaths of snaw, O’er ilka cleugh, ilk scar, and slap, As high as any Roman wa,’[247]
and he notes that
Speats aft roar frae mountains heigh.[248]
Such passages, though they show no love for the mountains, are yet sufficiently picturesque and exact to save Ramsay from the imputation of never having seen the wild country around him. To the ocean he gives but a single line,
Along wild shores, where tumbling billows break.[249]
It is interesting to note that in Ramsay as in Gay, Nature is made subordinate to man, in the sense that the pictures from Nature are nowhere elaborated or dwelt upon ostensibly for their own sake. The main interest is in the study of the characters.
The chief contribution of Gay and Ramsay to the growing love of Nature in poetry had to do with the natural man in natural scenes, rather than with the natural scene itself. Gay’s service in the way of external Nature was largely the outcome of his fidelity to the fact. Ramsay did more. He not only gave separate pictures both beautiful and true, but he somehow fused them with the human elements of his pastoral in such a way that we cannot think of the racy love-scenes apart from their fresh and lovely surroundings.
In 1725, or shortly before, were written three poems on Winter.[250] They are important as marking the first real turning from the softer to the sterner aspects of Nature. Dr. Armstrong’s poem was inspired by a winter spent among the wild romantic scenes about the River Esk. His later poetry is not important so far as the use of Nature is concerned. He became a great admirer of Thomson whose style he imitated with some success, but he shows little of Thomson’s sensitiveness to natural beauty. His point of view is that of the physician and his hatred of the town is based on his objection to smoke and bad air,[251] while his summons to the mountains rests on the value of exercise and oxygen.[252] One of the most effective passages is his apostrophe to the Liddal, that stream “unknown to song, where he played when life was young.”[253] The only poem on which we need to dwell is the “Winter,” which, though often unintelligible from its inflated and periphrastic form of expression, has yet a rugged vigor and originality. It shows occasionally a homely realism suggestive of Crabbe, as in the description of the shivering clown. The observation is most of it first-hand. The description of the birds that, when the storm comes on,
With domestic tameness, hop and flutter Within the roofs of persecuting man,
suggest Thomson’s famous redbreast. Note also the truth of lines such as these:
when the murk clouds Roll’d up in heavy wreaths, low-bellying, seem To kiss the ground, and all the waste of snow Looks blue beneath them;
or these:
huge sheets of loosen’d ice Float on their bosoms to the deep, and jar And clatter as they pass;
or, to strike a lovelier note, this closing hint of the coming spring:
Hark! how loud The cuckoo wakes the solitary wood!
The whole poem is characterized by a delight in the wildest phases of winter weather and it shows an originality of conception, a fulness of observation, and an occasional strength of expression remarkable in a boy not yet sixteen.
Riccaltoun’s “A Winter’s Day” is chiefly remarkable because its author was a friend of Thomson in his boyhood and doubtless helped to cultivate his taste for Nature; because it was this poem that suggested Thomson’s descriptions of winter; and because winter was at that time a new poetic theme. The “masterly touches” of which Thomson speaks are hard to find unless he referred merely to the rough truth in the catalogue-like summaries of natural facts. A discussion of Thomson’s “Winter” will come more naturally in the next section.
In this study of the period preceding Thomson we have still to notice the indications that even Pope and Addison were not left untouched by the new spirit. Such indications, however, show but faintly in their poetry. Addison’s “Cursus Glacialis” (1699) was written in Latin, and the few descriptive lines are purely conventional. It is simply an attempt to show that the vigorous sports of winter
“New brace the nerves, and active life supply.”
Pope’s “Pastorals” appeared in Tonson’s “Miscellany” in 1709. They were enthusiastically received, and apparently considered a charmingly natural presentation of country life. Wycherley called Pope’s Muse “a sprightly lass of the plains,” and said, that “in her modest and natural dress she outshone all Apollo’s court ladies in their more artful, laboured, and costly finery.”[254] But no assemblage of such contemporary judgments could convince a modern reader that these poems show any real traces of a conception of the outer world unlike that of the classicists. “Windsor Forest” (1713) must be more carefully noted, both because of Wordsworth’s implied commendation[255] in his reference to the “passage or two” that contain new images of external Nature, but chiefly because it is, as Courthope observes, the first “professed composition on local scenery” since Denham, and Marvell.[256] The poem was written at two different times. The first 290 lines have to do with the country. They were written in 1704, at about the same time as the “Pastorals.” Although this part of the poem purported to be the outcome of daily rides in Windsor Forest, the descriptions are so vague and general that most of them would fit any other spot as well. The lines that show personal observation are certainly few. What passages Wordsworth meant can only be surmised. He may have had in mind the description of the pheasants. But more exact observation is shown in the references to the doves flocking on the naked, frosty trees, the flight of the clamorous lapwing, the trembling of trees reflected in a stream, and the purple heather.[257] That Pope had some desire to conform to the truth in representing English scenery is indicated by his doubt as to the advisability of referring to the vintage in describing an English autumn.[258] And when he revised his poems he omitted “blushing,” as not being applicable to violets,[259] and “wolves,” as not belonging to England.[260] Warton points out, also, that in adapting a Latin description of the Eurotas to serve him in a description of the Thames, he changed “laurels” to “willows”.[261]
In spite of these indications of a desire to be true to Nature, it is to Pope’s prose rather than his poetry that we must turn for any real influence in favor of simplicity and truth in the presentation of natural facts. Though in reading Pope’s letters every statement is instinctively taken _cum grano salis_, because of his known insincerity and striving after effect, we now and then strike passages that have a genuine tone of pleasure in such mild forms of Nature as his physical condition enabled him to know.[262] Addison’s “Essays” also show real delight in the milder forms of the external world. “A beautiful prospect,” he says, “delights the soul as much as a demonstration.” “A man of polite imagination often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the possession.”[263] We note, too, his pleasure in wide views,[264] in sunset,[265] and in spring.[266] He also deprecated the use of pagan mythology as meaningless in the poetry of a Christian nation,[267] and he heartily praised Ambrose Philips’ attempts to confine English pastorals to English scenes.[268] And finally, both Pope and Addison were strong influences in bringing about the change from the formal to the natural school of gardening.[269]
SUMMARY
In a statement of the influences in this period that make for a new spirit toward Nature we must not forget that it was in reality a classical period, most of its tendencies and all of its best work being classical. The indications of the new spirit are fugitive, occasional, and usually unconscious. With this proviso, we may sum up the new tendencies. The change from the formal to the natural school of gardening was begun in this period, and owed much to Pope and Addison. The artificial shepherds and shepherdesses of the conventional pastoral were supplanted by real English and Scottish peasants, as in the work of Ambrose Philips, Gay, and Ramsay. There was a growing sense of the beauty and charm of the external world, as in Lady Winchilsea, Parnell, and Ramsay. In most of the poets mentioned in this period there was a new quickness and minuteness of observation leading to a wider knowledge of natural facts. There was appreciative recognition of new aspects of Nature, as night and winter. There was not lacking a hint of the romantic note of melancholy which later became one characteristic of the poetry of Nature. And there was recognition of the spiritual potencies in the external world. There was also an occasional self-conscious statement of new principles, as humorously in Gay, seriously in Ramsay, and casually in Pope and Addison.
THE POETS BETWEEN 1726 AND 1730
James Thomson (1700–1748) is confessedly the most important figure in the early history of Romanticism. He foreshadowed the new spirit in various ways, as in his strong love of liberty, his constant plea for the poor as against the rich, his preference for blank verse, his imitation of older models, especially Spenser, and in his tendency toward comprehensive schemes; but his chief importance is in his attitude toward external Nature. If, however, we take into consideration all his work, we shall find in more than three-fourths of it the utmost apparent indifference to Nature. In the five tragedies written between 1738 and 1748 there is no hint that their author knew more of the world about him than the veriest classicist of them all. In “Alfred” (1740), written by Thomson and Mallet, there are occasional descriptive touches, but these are almost too slight to mention when we think what effects might have been produced in a play the action of which occurs on a beautiful wooded island inhabited only by a few peasants. In the other tragedies Nature is drawn upon merely for conventional similitudes, as in “Edward and Elenora” (1739), where five of the eleven similitudes are the comparison of rage or fierce passions to tempests; or in “Sophonisba,” an earlier play (1728), where there is not a fresher or more forceful comparison than that of an army to a torrent, passion to a whirlwind, the hero to a lion, and the heroine to a blooming morn. In the 3,300 lines of the tedious poem, “Liberty” (1734–36), not more than fifty refer to external Nature, and of these the only passages that suggest, even remotely, the author of “The Seasons” are the descriptions of the sullen land of Sarmatia[270] and the shaggy mountain charms of the Swiss Alps.[271] “The Castle of Indolence,” written in 1733, is the only one of the poems written after 1730 that indicates any genuine love of Nature. The charm of this poem for modern readers is perhaps largely due to its use of external Nature, for, though there is little of the rich, elaborate description characteristic of “The Seasons,” what there is, is so exquisitely appropriate that all the listless, luxurious life of this land of soft delights is seen through a romantic and picturesque setting of waving, shadowy woods, sunny glades, and silver streams. Yet a closer study of the descriptive stanzas shows little more than a musically felicitous combination of the attributes conventionally recognized as belonging to a pleasing landscape. The only lines really indicative of a love of Nature such as the classicists had not known are the following from the second canto:
I care not, Fortune, what you me deny: You can not rob me of free Nature’s grace; You can not shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You can not bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.[272]
It is to “The Seasons” (1726–30) that we must go if we wish to understand Thomson’s work as a poet of Nature. A brief analysis of the study of external Nature in these poems will serve to show both in what respects Thomson’s work was the outcome of a new spirit, and in what respects its affiliations are with the old.
An important part of Thomson’s poetical endowment was his quick sensitiveness to the sights and sounds and odors of the world about him. He looked on Nature with the eye of an artist, but not of an artist in black and white. It was not form but color that attracted him. There are occasional descriptions, as of the garden in “Spring”[273] and of the precious stones in “Summer,”[274] where the lines glow like a painter’s palette, and throughout “The Seasons” there is a general impression of rich and varied coloring. That this impression is stronger than a list of the color terms used would seem to justify is due to two facts, both characteristic of Thomson’s work in general. In the first place he did not care for nicely discriminated shades or delicate tints. He loved broad masses of strong, clear color. He dwells with ever new delight on blue as seen in the sky or reflected in water, and on green, “smiling Nature’s universal robe.” In the second place he is especially rich in such words as indicate color in general without specification as to the kind. “The flushing year,” “every-coloured glory,” “the boundless blush of spring,” “the innumerous-coloured scene of things,” “unnumbered dyes,” “hues on hues,” are typical phrases. Motion also caught his eye more quickly than form. The dancing light and shade in a forest pathway, the waving of branches, the flow of water, the rapid flight or slow march of clouds, the golden, shadowy sweep of wind over ripened grain, count for much in the pleasurable impression made upon his mind by different scenes.
It is evident that Thomson received more through his eye than through his ear, but he was very far from being indifferent to the sounds of Nature. The hum of bees, the low of cattle, the bleating of sheep are frequently noted. The songs of birds, while often represented by some general phase, as “the music of the woods,” or “woodland hymns,” are now and then more minutely specified, as in the fine description of the “symphony of spring.”[275] There is also effective representation of the sounds heard in storms, as in the summer thunderstorm.[276] The most frequent sounds are, as is inevitable in an English poet whose facts come from actual observation, those made by water, as the plaint of purling rills, the thunder of impetuous torrents, or the growling of frost-imprisoned rivers.
While Thomson was not the first poet to speak of the odor of the bean-flower, his words show a keen appreciation of that perfume, and certainly the “smell of dairy” was a country odor first poetically noticed by him. His sensitiveness to odors is not especially marked, yet it is safe to say that he was in this respect more observant than his immediate predecessors or contemporaries.
In reading the poetry of Nature after Dryden in historical sequence, there is, in coming to “The Seasons,” a sudden sense of freedom and elation, a sense of having at last come upon a poet who writes freely and spontaneously from a large personal experience, whose facts press in upon him even too abundantly. He knows many kinds of Nature and under varying aspects. His garden picture, though somewhat too much in the floral catalogue style, shows how well he knew the cultivated flowers he described, and he speaks with no less loving minuteness of furze, the thorny brake, the purple heather, dewy cowslips, white hawthorn, and lilies of the vale. It is a pleasure to see how much he knew about birds. He describes their habits with remarkable accuracy and minuteness. He shows their tender arts in courtship,[277] their skill in nest-building,[278] and the “pious frauds” whereby they lure away the would-be trespasser.[279] In no poetry between Marvell and Thomson do we find birds so fully described, and Marvell has nothing so charming and sympathetic as Thomson’s winter redbreast.[280] Thomson’s scope is also wider in that he knew the birds of the seashore[281] as well as those of wood and meadow. Equally close attention is given to the various domestic fowl. The peacock had flaunted his painted tail through poetry for a hundred years, and is now for the first time outranked as an object of interested observation by the hen, the duck, and the turkey.[282] The frequent descriptions of domestic animals, especially the sheep,[283] the horse,[284] and the ox,[285] also show minute knowledge such as could not have been gained from books. It is, moreover, a significant fact that through these numerous and varied studies there runs a genuine love for animals. Thomson was, at least in poetic theory, a vegetarian, and he vigorously denounced the killing of animals for food as conduct worthy only of wild beasts.[286] His poetical invectives against hunting are as vigorous as Cowper’s.[287] He objects to caging birds,[288] and his indignation waxes high over the bees “robb’d and murder’d” by man’s tyranny.[289] The only unoffending animal that escapes Thomson’s wide sympathy is the fish.[290] The skill with which the monarch of the brook is lured from his dark haunt and at last “gaily” dragged to land is described with a gusto in curious contrast to the pity lavished on the tortured worm that may have served for bait.[291]
As we have just seen, the animals that Thomson described were those that any country lad might know rather than those that had been canonically set apart for poetical service. The same independent judgment is evident in his study of other neglected realms in the world of Nature. He gloried in storms and winter. Though he now and then falls into the conventional phraseology, and speaks of winter as drear and awful, he yet in the same breath exclaims that he finds its horrors congenial. The contrast of a first winter in London turns his mind with full emphasis to the days of his youth when he wandered with unceasing joy through virgin snows, and listened to the roar of the winds and the bursting torrent, and watched the deep tempest brewing in the grim sky. Such experiences he remembers with joy for they “exalt the soul to solemn thought.”[292] Through all the descriptive portions of the “Winter” there is a vigorous, manly enthusiasm as tonic and bracing as the bright, frosty days themselves. Thomson’s pleasure in the sterner phenomena of Nature is further shown by his evident delight in tracing the progress of any storm, whether the thunder storm of summer,[293] the devastating wind and rain of autumn,[294] or the black gloom of a winter tempest.[295] These fierce tempests certainly are of more comparative importance in “The Seasons” than they are in Nature. Their frequent choice may be in part due to their dramatic qualities of rapidity and force. The crashing and hurtling of the elements was a subject not unsuited to Thomson’s splendid but ponderous and swelling style. But in the main it is only fair to suppose that he wrote of storms well because he had many times watched them with an interest that had made him remember them.
With many other aspects of Nature was Thomson familiar. He knew much of the sky both by day and by night. His few short descriptions of the starry heavens are worth more than all Young’s far-sought epithets.[296] One phrase concerning the radiant orbs
That more than deck, that animate the sky,[297]
seems a conscious turning away from the old artificial conception. One of the finest moonlight passages[298] is reminiscent of Milton in two lines,
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop, Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime,
but the close,
The whole air whitens with a boundless tide Of silver radiance, trembling round the world,
is Thomson’s own, and is a good example of the full sweet harmony that marks his verse at its best. There are many passages and apparently casual phrases indicative of the closeness with which he watched clouds.[299] The doubling fogs that roll around the hills and wrap the world in a “formless gray confusion” through which the shepherd stalks gigantic is described with a Wordsworthian felicity and precision.[300]
The descriptions referred to below of early morning,[301] of sunset,[302] of evening,[303] and of night[304] may be perhaps taken as among the best examples of their sort in “The Seasons.” As a whole they show conclusively from what long intimacy with Nature Thomson wrote. The very freshness of morning breathes from the sunrise picture in “Summer” and the little picture in “Autumn” is more delicately suggestive than many a more pretentious description of the dawning day. The sunset after the rain in “Spring” is one of the best examples of Thomson’s power to paint word pictures. It would be difficult for any canvas to present a scene at once so mellow and radiant, and so transfused with the joy of a renovated earth. As exquisite in their way are the descriptions of the slow approach of “Sober Evening” with her circling shadows and the softly swelling breeze that stirs the stream and wood; and the later description of the strange uncertain mingling of light and darkness in a summer night in England. These passages and others that might be quoted show to what fine issues Thomson’s pen was sometimes touched, but it cannot be denied that his really intimate and exact knowledge of Nature and her ways could not hold all his descriptions subject to the charm of simplicity and truth.
As further illustrative of Thomson’s knowledge of all that pertained to the country we have his admirably vivid and detailed accounts of the homely labors of a farmer’s life, as plowing,[305] sowing,[306] reaping,[307] hay making,[308] and sheep shearing.[309] Of these the sheep shearing is the most simply charming and natural. It is also the most noteworthy, because sheep and shepherds had long been the very substance out of which pastorals were woven so that in such descriptions the contrast between the new and the old way of looking at country life is sharply defined. Thomson’s pastoral queen and shepherd king are at the opposite pole from the sentimental, affected, useless nymphs and swains who had before posed as the guardians of English sheep. His shepherds are sturdy fellows, doing honest work and plenty of it, and as such they had no predecessors in English classical poetry. The sheep, too, are real animals. They have to be watched with a vigilance of which no flower-crowned swain playing on an oaten pipe would be capable. And they must be washed and sheared and branded. In winter they must be housed and fed, no matter what the dangers on the dark, stormy hills. It is this strong, refreshing air of reality in Thomson’s poetry, and his unfeigned respect and admiration for the actual country life in England that completed the work begun by the ugly satire of Swift and the mock pastorals of Gay, and made the old, conventional, pseudo-classic pastoral from that time on an impossibility in English poetry.
The phrase, “dislike of boundaries,” is perhaps not very apt, but it may serve to describe what is certainly a pervasive quality of Thomson’s work, and a significant quality, for if there was one thing more pleasing than another to an orthodox classicist it was a well-defined limit. Thomson preferred the blank verse to the couplet because the unrhymed, flowing lines gave a certain freedom. There is an air of abundance, of even undue exuberance about much of his work. Even his diction presents this idea of lavishness. There is a surprisingly large number of such words as “effulgent,” “refulgent,” “effusion,” “diffusion,” “suffusion,” “profusion,” from the roots “fundo” and “fulgeo” with their idea of a liberal pouring out. “Luxuriant,” “ample,” “prodigal,” “boundless,” “unending,” “ceaseless,” “immense,” “interminable,” “immeasurable,” “vast,” “infinite,” are typical words.
Profusely poured around, Materials infinite,
Infinite splendor wide investing all,
To the far horizon wide-diffused, A boundless deep immensity of shade,
Night, a shade immense, magnificent and vast,
are typical phrases. In one short description the birds are “innumerous;” they are “prodigal” of harmony; their joy overflows in music “unconfined;” the song of the linnets is “poured out profusely.”[310] In another short passage the stores of the vale are “lavish,” the lily is “luxuriant” and grows in fair “profusion,” the flowers are “unnumbered,” beauty is “unbounded,” and bees fly in “swarming millions.”[311] When images come into his mind it is by the ten thousand. In spring the country is “one boundless blush,” “far diffused around.” He loves the “liberal air,” “lavish fragrance,” “full luxuriance,” “extensive harvests,” “immeasurable,” or “exhaustless” stores, “copious exhalations.” All is superlative, exaggerated, scornful of limits. It was “the unbounded scheme of things” that most appealed to him.
The same point receives illustration in his sense for landscape. He rejoiced in a wide view.[312] He loved to seek out some proud eminence and there let his eye wander “far excursive,” and dwell on “boundless prospects.” Such scenes not only gave him a chance for picturesque enumerations without any especial demand for minute discrimination, but they satisfied his preference for grand, general effects.
Closely connected with the sense for landscape is the use of geographical romance,[313] or the heightening of poetic effect by the accumulation of sounding geographical names.[314] The finest example of this device is in the lines descriptive of the thunder re-echoed among the mountains.[315] In this passage the impression of sublimity is due to the suggestions of mysterious elemental forces subtly associated with such names as Carnarvon, Penmaenmawr, Snowdon, Thule, and Cheviot.[316] This mental following of the thunder from peak to distant peak, this endeavor to strengthen the impression by the use of the remote and the unknown, show a mind set toward romantic rather than classical ideals.
A further indication of Thomson’s defiance of limits is his curiosity. His mind goes back of the present fact and restlessly strives after causes and origins.[317] In imagination he seeks to penetrate to the vast eternal springs from which Nature refreshes the earth.[318] The most poetic example of this questioning spirit is in his address to the winds that blow with boisterous sweep to swell the terrors of the storm.
In what far-distant region of the sky, Hush’d in deep silence, sleep you when ’tis calm?[319]
The classical spirit held itself to useful questions that could have some rational answer. It is the romantic spirit that pushes its inquiries into the realms of the unknowable.
Throughout this study of Thomson’s work there has been an implicit recognition of his strong love for Nature. This fact receives further definite confirmation from his letters. It is interesting to note that his early life was almost as fortunate in its environment as Wordsworth’s. When he was a year old his father moved to Southdean, a small hamlet near Jedborough. Here the lad remained till he entered the university at Edinburgh at fifteen,[320] and here he apparently passed most of his vacations till he went to London at twenty-five. One of his especial friends was Dr. Cranston of Ancrum whose love of Nature was equal to his own. Thomson’s letters to Dr. Cranston, though somewhat stilted and high-flown, show clearly the eagerness with which they had together explored the picturesque country along the Tiviot and its tributary streams, the Ale and the Jed. In the first letter from London, under the date April 3, 1725, was written, “I wish you joy of the spring.” In September of the same year Thomson wrote from Barnet:
Now I imagine you seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on the fading of the year; now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive, ’midst the brown, wither’d groves, while the leaves rustle under your feet, the sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds
Stir the faint note and but attempt to sing.
Then again when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle, and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known clough, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades, while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene at any easy rate. None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit and disport in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance; but where is the living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that elegantly please the lover of nature. Nature delights me in every form.
Later in life Thomson was “more fat than bard beseems,” and correspondingly indolent, and his biographers give the impression that no beauty of the world about him could compete with the charms of an easy chair. But his letters still bear witness to a love of Nature as real if not as active as that of his youth. In July, 1743, he wrote to Mr. Lyttleton promising to spend some weeks with him at Hagley:
As this will fall in Autumn, I shall like it the better, for I think that season of the year the most pleasing and the most poetical. The spirits are not then dissipated with the gaiety of spring, and the glaring light of summer, but composed into a serious and tempered joy. The year is perfect.... The muses, whom you obligingly say I shall bring with me, I shall find with you--the muses of the great, simple country, not the little, fine-lady muses of Richmond Hill.
Again four or five years later, he wrote to Paterson, “Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day.”[321]
This passion for Nature finds frequent expression in the poems, but no citation of specific instances can be so convincing as the general impression of unforced personal enthusiasm made upon the reader of “The Seasons.” Moreover, Thomson’s conception of the effect of Nature on man, the next topic, may be fairly counted as but a transcript from his own experience, and therefore as further illustrative of his love for Nature.
In “The Seasons” as in preceding poetry both man and Nature have a place, but there is a great transfer of emphasis. Nature had been ignored or counted as the servant, the background, the accompaniment of man. Now the human incidents are few and unimportant and are used chiefly to lay additional stress by their tone on the spirit characteristic of each season. Nature is loved and studied and described purely for her own sake. There is very little use of natural facts as similes for human qualities, and there is, practically, no use of pathetic fallacy. The effect of Nature on the man sensitive to her high ministration is represented as twofold. In the first place and chiefly, she storms his senses with her ravishing delights. She gives him pleasures of the most rich and varied sort. She enchants him with color and harmony and perfume. These pleasures are, however, of the eye and ear. They do not touch the deeper joys of the heart. Of the appeal of Nature to the soul of man, in the true Wordsworthian sense, Thomson knew little. Yet occasional passages indicate that he had received from Nature gifts higher than that of mere external, sensuous enjoyment. He attributes to Nature in at least a partially Wordsworthian sense, the power of soothing, elevating, and instructing. He sings the “infusive force” of spring on man,
When heaven and earth as if contending vie To raise his being, and serene his soul.[322]
It is his delight to “meditate the book of Nature” for thence he hopes to “learn the moral song.”[323] At the soft evening hour, he
lonely loves To seek the distant hills, and there converse With nature, there to harmonize his heart.[324]
Not only does he attend to Nature’s voice from month to month, and watch with admiration her every shape, but he
Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart.[325]
While these and a few other similar passages would hardly be remarked in the poetry of Nature after Wordsworth, they are of great historical importance because they show the early beginning of that spirit which received its final and perfect expression seventy years later in “The Lyrical Ballads.”
Thomson’s two dominant conceptions in his thought of God in Nature were as the almighty Creator and the ever-active Ruler. The whole tenor of his poems goes to show that he saw in Nature not God himself but God’s hand. Even his invocations to Nature, animate and inanimate, to praise God in one general song of adoration, are but highly emotional and figurative statements of the conception that God is not all, but Lord of all. Now and then, however, in the midst of the old ideas there comes the breath of a new thought. In one line we find the cold, conventional idea; in the next, an intimation of divine immanence. God’s beauty walks forth in the spring. His spirit breathes in the gales. The seasons “are but the varied God.” God is the Universal Soul of Heaven and earth. He is the Essential Presence in all Nature.[326] Such sentences as these, whether uttered consciously, or half unconsciously under the influence of poetic excitement, clearly prefigure the modern conception of the union and inter-penetration of the physical and spiritual worlds.
Of the two general points to be kept in view in the study of Thomson as a poet of Nature the second was a consideration of his affiliations with the classical spirit. It is surprising to observe in how few respects such affiliations can be justly predicated. There are occasional references to his Doric reed, and frequent invocations to his muse. As preliminary justification of his choice of themes are quotations from Virgil and Horace. The authority of the “Rural Maro” and the example of Cincinnatus lend added dignity to the English plow. Personifications of the conventional type often appear. There is one purely didactic description of the cure for a pest of insects, and another description of the method by which bees are robbed of their honey, that are evidently framed on Latin models. Nor do we miss the ever-recurring advice to read the page of the Mantuan swain beneath a spreading tree on a warm noon.
We also find that toward mountains and the sea Thomson held almost the traditional attitude. His nearness to the coast and his knowledge of shore birds show that he could not have been entirely ignorant of the ocean, but it apparently made little impression on him, for he seldom mentions it even casually, and but once with any emphasis. It is then one of the elements of a wild, fierce storm that sweeps the coast. A few of his epithets for mountains, as “keen-air’d” and “forest-rustling,” are new though not especially felicitous, and he often mentions mountains by name, or as bounding some distant prospect. But in general his conception and his phraseology are those of his contemporaries. He speaks of the Alps as “dreadful,” as “horrid, vast, sublime,” and again as “horrid mountains.” There is nowhere any evidence of the modern feeling toward mountains, though there are frequent expressions of appreciative love for green hills.
The point in which Thomson shows strongest traces of the old influence is his diction. He often has the new thought before he has found the appropriate dress for it. Birds are still the “plumy” or “feathery people,” and fish are the “finny race.” “Shaggy” and “nodding” are used of mountains and rocks and forests, and “deformed” and “inverted” of winter, in true classical fashion. “Maze” is one of his most frequent words. “Horrid” still holds a useful place. “Amusing” is five times applied to the charms of some landscape. Leaves are the “honours” of trees, paths are “erroneous,” caverns “sweat,” and all sorts of things are “innumerous.” He also makes large use of Latinized words such as “turgent,” “bibulous,” “relucent,” “luculent,” “irriguous,” “gelid,” “ovarious,” “incult,” “concactive,” “hyperborean.” These words can hardly be said to belong to any received poetic diction. They are rather a mannerism of Thomson’s style, and an outgrowth of his delight in swelling, sounding phrases.
From this summary we at once perceive how few and comparatively unimportant were the characteristics held in common by Thomson and the classicists in their treatment of external Nature.
This study of “The Seasons” shows that so far as intrinsic worth is concerned the poems are marked by a strange mingling of merits and defects, but that, considered in their historical place in the development of the poetry of Nature, their importance and striking originality can hardly be over-stated. Though Thomson talked the language of his day, his thought was a new one. He taught clearly, though without emphasis, the power of Nature to quiet the passions and elevate the mind of man, and he intimated a deeper thought of divine immanence in the phenomena of Nature. But his great service to the men of his day was that he shut up their books, led them out of their parks, and taught them to look on Nature with enthusiasm. This service is of the greater historical value because it was so well adapted to the times. To begin with, it was a necessary first step. People cannot love what they do not know. Lead them to Nature, teach them to observe with amazement and delight, and the other steps follow in due course in accordance with the power of each soul to receive the deeper influences of Nature. In the second place, men were just ready to take this first decisive step away from the artificial to the natural. The work of the poets who immediately preceded Thomson had been too slight and fragmentary to count for much in the way of influence, yet they were most clear indications of a tendency, a silent preparation of the general poetic mind, for such work as Thomson’s. He was at once and easily understood because, while his poems in their spontaneous freshness and charm, their rich, easy fulness of description, their minute observation, their sweep of view, their unforced enthusiasm, must have come as a revelation, it was a revelation in no sense defiant or iconoclastic. In the main it was a revelation of new delights, not of disturbing theories, or vexing problems. A touch more of subtlety, of vision, of mystery, of the faculty divine, and Thomson might have waited for recognition as Wordsworth did.[327]
John Dyer’s (1700–1758) more ambitious poems, “The Ruins of Rome” (1740) and “The Fleece” (1757), belong to a much later period than the present. Of these the first may be passed over as containing hardly a touch of Nature. The second is a long didactic poem showing much technical knowledge of sheep-raising, weaving, dyeing, and home and foreign trade. It has frequent panegyrics of liberty and simplicity. It abounds with geographical details, and is notable as having so many full and often exact descriptive references to the rivers of Great Britain. The Avon, the Severn, the Thames, the Towy, the Vaga, the Ryddol, the Ystwith, the Clevedoc, the Lune, the Coker, the Ouze, and the Usk are chief among these. He is apparently always conscious of the rivers, rills, streams, or waterfalls in any landscape. But in general the poem is conventional in diction,[328] in the choice of similitudes, and in the occasional descriptions. Its use of geographical details, though sometimes suggestive and stimulating, as in the lines,
Tempestuous regions, Darwent’s naked peaks, Snowden and blue Plynlymmon and the wide Aërial sides of Cader-yddris huge,[329]
is more often simply wearisome. It is true of Dyer, as it was of Thomson, that his really excellent poetry of Nature was written when he was fresh from long and familiar knowledge of Nature in her wilder forms, and that travel and contact with men served to dull the power of these early experiences. “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk” were published the same year as Thomson’s “Summer,” and were doubtless written the year before. They could hardly have been a result of the impetus given by Thomson to the study of Nature. They are rather an original and independent contribution toward the same end. They were the expression of personal experience, and the direct outcome of native taste and singularly fortunate environment. Dyer’s life before his school days at Westminster was spent in the wild and romantic country in Carmarthenshire, and during the years immediately preceding the publication of these two poems he was wandering through other parts of South Wales as an “itinerant painter.” His previous study with Richardson had helped to develop that artistic sensitiveness to external impressions so apparent in his early work. He notes the colors and shapes of the trees grouped below him, the gloomy pine and sable yew, the blue poplar, the yellow beech, the fir with its slender, tapering trunk, the sturdy oak with its broad-spread boughs. The changing horizon line as he climbs the hill, the long level lines of the lawn, the various movements of rivers running swift or slow, through sun and shade, the streaks of meadow, the close, small lines of distant hedges, the curling spires of smoke, are observations that show the trained eye.[330] His colors seem to be rather carefully discriminated. Yellow receives unusual emphasis. The linnet’s yellow plumage, the yellow foliage of the beech, the mountain-tops shining yellow in the sun, and even the “yellow barn” catch his eye. This preference for yellow characterizes his later work. He speaks of “yellow corn,” “yellow tillages,” “yellowing plains,” and the “yellow Tiber.” He also liked the words “golden” and “sunny.” Purple is applied to evening and to the groves at evening, and seems to be used with some real sense of the modern specific meaning of the word. In later work the color purple became almost a stock epithet with him;
Purple Eve Stretches her shadows,[331]
When many-colour’d Evening sinks behind The purple woods and hills,[332]
The purple skirts of flying day,[333]
When evening mild Purples the valleys,[334]
Wide abroad Expands the purple deep,[335]
are typical phrases. He also notices the “thousand flaming flowers” in the fields, the silver and gold of the morning clouds, the shining of lakes, the evening colors reflected in slow streams, and the soft fair hues of distant mountain summits. He delights in the sounds of Nature, especially in the songs of birds. Not for many years after Dyer is there so effective a bit of bird-song poetry as the closing lines of “Grongar Hill.” Nor is he indifferent to odors, for he notes the perfumed breeze from the valley, the fragrant brakes, and the sweet-smelling honeysuckle. It is worthy of note that in these two short poems nearly a hundred natural facts are mentioned.
In this wide observation Dyer includes some features not hitherto counted as parts of a poetic landscape. The “windy summit wild and high,” naked rocks, and barren ground, are mingled with the softer details, and
Each gives each a double charm.
He nowhere dwells upon mountains in his descriptions, but the slight touches here and there and the general tone of the poems are sufficient to show his great delight in mountain scenery. He represents himself as climbing slowly and looking back often so as not to miss a single phase of the view unfolding before him. Once on the top he gazes out over the lovely prospect and exclaims,
Now, even now, my joys run high As on the mountain turf I lie.
In “The Fleece” are further indications of this love of mountains and wide views. The passage beginning
Huge Breaden’s stony summit once I climbed[336]
is typical.
Those slow-climbing wilds, that lead the step Insensibly to Dover’s windy cliff, Tremendous height![337]
and
By the blue steeps of distant Malvern walled, Solemnly vast.[338]
have something of the modern touch.
The prevailing interest in these poems is in Nature, but there are one or two charming pictures of homely life. The old man’s hut and garden on the edge of the wood, and the barnyard scene are as attractive as they are realistic. And surely the tattered old man digging up cabbage in the shade might have been expected to wait at least for Crabbe or Wordsworth to introduce him into the select company of the Muses. The same may be said of the tramp asleep by the roadside.[339]
In any tabulation Dyer’s use of Nature would seem to be much more abundant than it is for in “The Fleece” he of necessity used a large number of geographical details merely to mark out localities and with no more literary quality than there would be on a map. His chief use of Nature is twofold, and is best seen in the short poems, “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk.” He describes a landscape with loving minuteness for its own sake, and he regards it as the occasion for a strain of half-melancholy reflection on human life. This gentle, quaintly precise moralizing is unlike the typical classical didacticism in that it seems to spring inevitably from the effect of natural objects on the poet’s mind, instead of being itself a main thing and laboriously illustrated by such natural facts as came to hand.
The entire impression made by the two poems is that they were written by one who knew Nature better than books. The negative as well as the positive qualities of the poem show this. There are almost no conventional phrases.[340] Of the personified abstract qualities, two at least, Pleasure and Quiet, are so imaginatively conceived as not to belong to the category of cold classical personifications. The only classical allusion is significant as being to the “fair Castalian springs” “deserted now” by all but “slavish hinds.”[341] But the poems show something more than first-hand as opposed to bookish knowledge of Nature. Their author evidently loved to linger over the charms of Nature in solitude, to let them sink into his mind and heart. There is a power of quiet contemplation, of “wise passiveness,” such as Thomson never knew. The closing lines of “Grongar Hill,”
Be full, ye courts; be great who will; Search for Peace with all your skill: Open wide the lofty door, Seek her on the marble floor, In vain you search, she is not there; In vain ye search the domes of care! Grass and flowers Quiet treads, On the meads, and mountain heads, Along with Pleasure, close-ally’d, Ever by each other’s side: And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush, while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill,
show a wonderfully true and delicate apprehension of the spiritual influences that speak through Nature’s forms. It is putting into plainer words what was the underlying conception in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment.”
As has been observed, Dyer speedily left his first love and devoted himself to laborious, didactic blank verse. We cannot find that his two short poems attracted much attention at the time. Thomson’s glory blazed forth so effulgently that lesser lights were but dimly seen. Now, however, as we go from poet to poet of the period, we cannot fail to be impressed by the unusual sincerity, simplicity, and truth with which Dyer wrote of Nature. And we feel that while he lacked Thomson’s power and fertility, he was nearly equal to him in originality, and superior to him in delicacy.
David Mallet’s (1705–65) chief poems in which there is use of external Nature are “A Fragment,” “The Excursion,” and “Amyntor and Theodora.” The undated “A Fragment” reads like a poetical exercise in the style of Dyer’s “The Country Walk” and “Grongar Hill.” The octosyllabic verse, the general plan of a walk at different times of day, the ascent of a hill for the view, the pleasure in the solitude of Nature, the moralizing invocations to Health and Freedom, are all suggestive of Dyer. The description of the noontide woodland retreat, of the forest sounds, and of the poet’s revery are like passages in “The Country Walk,” while both the spirit and form of some passages in “Grongar Hill” are paralleled by such lines as,
On the brow of mountain high In silence feasting ear and eye,[342]
or,
And then at utmost stretch of eye A mountain fades into the sky; While winding round, diffused and deep, A river rolls with sounding sweep.[343]
“The Excursion” and “Amyntor and Theodora” are interesting because of their relation to the work of Thomson. Thomson and Mallet were students together at Edinburgh, and there was evidently a close literary comradeship between them, which lasted through the first years of their London life. During the summer of 1726 they were both engaged in literary work, the result of which was, on Thomson’s part, “Summer,” and on Mallet’s, about 300 lines of the first canto of “The Excursion.”[344] There was a vigorous interchange of letters concerning the two poems, each author giving advice and criticism on the passages sent him by the other.[345] A comparison of the poems shows numerous resemblances. As an illustration we may take the sunrise with which each poem opens. The order of occurrences is the same in each--night, faint gleams in the east, breaking clouds, rising mists, retreat of wild animals, song of birds, work of shepherds, full rising of sun, praise to God, reflections on the inspiration to be gained from Nature. There are also many curious verbal similarities. In Thomson the meek-eyed _Morn_, mother of _dews_, comes _faint-gleaming_ in the east to destroy night’s _doubtful_ empire, and before the _lustre_ of her face the clouds break _white_ away. In Mallet sacred _Morn pale-glimmering_ comes with _dewy_ radiance through the _doubtful_ twilight and spreads a _whitening lustre_ over the sky. In Thomson the powerful _King of Day looks_ in boundless majesty _abroad_. In Mallet the _King of Glory looks abroad_ on Nature. These are but suggestions of the many unmistakable but baffling and intricately interwoven similarities in the two poems. If we had but these two poems it would be, perhaps, impossible to say which poet exerted the stronger influence. Thomson’s deference to Mallet’s judgment is evident. “Winter” was submitted to him for correction,[346] and the splendid passage on precious stones in “Summer” was an addition proposed by him.[347] Thomson also greatly admired Mallet’s work.[348] Thomson’s work, on the other hand, bears the impress of a genuine enthusiasm and a manysided personal experience, while Mallet’s work reads like that of a facile versifier speaking out of a meager experience and with a forced enthusiasm. At any rate, when we come to “Amyntor and Theodora,” published years after the full edition of “The Seasons,” Mallet is clearly imitative in thought and phrase. The ocean, for instance, is described as “through boundless space diffused, magnificently dreadful.” Again it is “diffused immense,” and “magnificently various.” In its depths “immeasurably sunk,” “ten thousand thousand tribes endless range.” Its stormy waves are “mountains surging to the stars, commotion infinite” and they break in “boundless undulation.” Storms are presaged by “doubling clouds on clouds.” The earth glows with “the boundless blush of spring.” At sunset the sea shines with “an unbounded blush.” A comparison of these phrases with those quoted from Thomson on p. 92, will serve to show in how exaggerated and inartistic a form Thomson’s mannerisms reappeared in the later work of Mallet. Mallet’s work, if it had been first in the field, would have marked a distinct advance in the conception of Nature. As it is he is of real importance as indicating the influence of Dyer, and especially of Thomson.
“The Wanderer” by Richard Savage (1698–1743) appeared in 1729. Of this poem Dr. Johnson says that it was “never denied to abound with strong representations of nature,” but a study of the five long, confused, formless cantos hardly confirms such an opinion. Most of the descriptions, like those of Mallet’s “Excursion,” are of scenes too remote for damaging comparisons with the reality, as of sunrise at the north pole, or of wide prospects from unknown mounts. The various details are brought together with little sense of unity. He called the poem a vision, and he had perhaps a right to dreamlike combinations of facts, but the result is not a contribution to the study of external Nature. His diction is vague and inexpressive. There is large use of stock poetic words, and there are many Thomsonian echoes. Most of the descriptions are tame, classical imitations. They show almost no first-hand knowledge of the country. There is, however, one characteristic of his poetry that cannot fail to arrest the attention, and that is his use of color. Not even Thomson is so lavish with bright tints, and they are sometimes nicely discriminated. Illustrative passages are referred to in the note.[349] He observes the color of “crooked, sunny roads” that change “from brown, to sandy-red, and chalky hues.” He perceives the “green grass yellowing into hay.” His sunset sky has several colors that had not been noted in poetry. Some of the clouds had “the unripen’d cherry’s die;” others were “mild vermilion,” “streaked through white,” and there was in the sky a tinge of “floating green,” the result of the “blue veil’d yellow” of certain distant clouds. In a moonrise picture there are eight colors, besides twelve words indicative of brightness, and that in a description of thirteen lines. The best of these descriptions is that of the peas and beans in blossom. References such as those to the peas that with their “mixed flowers of red and azure” run in “colour’d lanes along the furrows,” and to the beans that after a rain “fresh blossom in a speckled flower” bear the mark of first-hand observation. The same may be said of his brief touches descriptive of the roads and the fields and the sunset sky already referred to. There is also fairly abundant reference to birds, though but a single line,
The bullfinch whistles soft his flute-like note,
exhibits any special felicity in expression. On the whole, Savage is important in the history of the poetry of Nature merely for his detailed insistence on color.
Among the minor poets of this period was Stephen Duck (1705–1756). He spent most of his life on a farm where he early began to write verses which attracted much local attention and finally gained for their author substantial favor at Court. His “Thresher’s Labour” is interesting simply because it is a realistic treatment of a homely English theme.[350] Duck’s poems were popular in their own day, but his treatment of Nature is commonplace.
The poetry of these four years is interesting because it indicates how early Thomson’s influence made itself felt, as in the work of Mallet and Savage; and also because it shows a use of Nature quite unlike Thomson’s and equally significant of coming tendencies, as in the work of Dyer.
THE POETS BETWEEN 1730 AND 1756
The choice of 1756 as the date to mark the close of this period is based on the appearance in that year of Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope.” In the twenty-six years between Thomson’s “Seasons” and this “Essay,” the most important literary works are in prose, as the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, and the theological writings of Butler, Hume, and Warburton. The period is marked by the establishment of numerous periodicals, by the work of editors, and of compilers. The most important poetry of the period was the “Essay on Man,” “Moral Essays,” and “The Dunciad” by Pope. In writing of this sort there is, of course, little use of external Nature. And it has already been shown that the tragedies of Thomson and the later work of Armstrong, Mallet, and Dyer which appeared during these years, either ignore Nature or treat it in a stiff or simply imitative manner. But there are in the twenty-six years poems that are not only in accord with the changing attitude toward Nature, but that distinctly aid in the evolution of the new conception. The chief names are William Somerville (1675–1742), William Shenstone (1714–63), Matthew Greene, (1696–1737), William Collins (1721–59), William Hamilton (1704–54), Edward Young (1683–1765), Dr. Akenside (1721–70), Thomas Gray (1716–71), Joseph Warton (1722–1800), and Thomas Warton (1728–90). There are other authors whose works are not, as a whole, of importance in this study, but who have written single poems of some significance. Some of these minor poets are Samuel Boyse (1708–49), William Whitehead (1715–85), Dr. John Dalton (1709–63), R. Potter (1721–1804), William Mason (1724–97), Francis Coventry (d. 1759?), Richard Jago (1715–81), Moses Mendes (d. 1758), William Thompson (1712?–66?), Joseph Relph (1712–43), John Gilbert Cooper (1723–69), and Robert Blair (1699–1746).
Somerville, “a country gentleman and a skillful and useful Justice of the Peace,” was a mighty hunter in his day, and found, in leisure hours, great pleasure in throwing into blank verse the accumulated wisdom of years in the field. “The Chace” he calls his “bold, instructive song,” and it so well carries out the second epithet as to be of interest only to his “brethren of the couples” to whose kindness he commends it. There is the most minute description of the kinds of hounds, the breeding of dogs, the care of whelps, their habits, their diseases and the best remedies, and the most desirable kennels. In “Field Sports” we have almost as close a description of hawking. Both poems are, however, destitute of any real love of Nature. The diction, except for a free use of canine technicalities, is extremely limited and commonplace; and we look in vain for the occasional happy touch, the felicitous epithet or line, that would indicate any original or appreciative knowledge of the external world. When this vigorous squire went out to hunt he had eyes but for the dogs and the game. His few descriptions are of the conventional type, as:
Hail, gentle Dawn! mild, blushing goddess, hail! Rejoic’d I see thy purple mantle spread O’er half the skies, gems pave thy radiant way, And orient pearls from every shrub depend.[351]
They are weak imitations, lifeless and vague. “Hobbinol” is a disagreeable poem. Its very ugly rural pictures might perhaps rank as realistic studies of English country life, but so far as any country atmosphere is concerned they are of no importance. The smock-race, the wrestling match, the drunken affray, might as well have taken place in any city slums.
Somerville had a catholic taste in poetry. He greatly admired Homer, Virgil, Pope, Allan Ramsay, and Thomson. The last poet he not only admired, but imitated. The passage beginning,
Justly supreme! let us thy power revere,[352]
is a pretty clear echo from Thomson’s “Hymn,” and the closing twenty-five lines of “The Chace” must have been studied from the closing twenty-two lines of “Autumn.” Somerville is noteworthy in the present study only because he wrote on country themes, and imitated Thomson.
Shenstone is a much more important figure in the history of the poetry of Nature. His sensitiveness to the new spirit and his reverence for the old form make him an interesting transitional influence. His “Prefatory Essay on Elegy” shows this Janus attitude and, what is more, his own consciousness of it. “If the author has hazarded throughout the use of English or modern allusions, he hopes it will not be imputed to an _entire_ ignorance, or to the _least_ disesteem, of the ancient learning. He has kept the ancient plan and method in his eye, though he builds his edifice with the materials of his own nation. In other words, through a fondness for his native country he has made use of the flowers it produced, though, in order to exhibit them to the greater advantage, he has endeavored to weave his garland by the best model he could find.”[353] This statement is interesting as being directly opposed to the thought in Gay’s experiment. Both poets mean to hold by the Latin form and use English materials, the one to show that the two are incompatible, the other to show that they may be united. Neither Gay nor Shenstone thought of discarding the Latin form. In the same “Essay” he claims that in his use of Nature he has drawn only on personal experience. “If he describes a rural landskip, or unfolds the train of sentiments it inspired, he fairly drew his picture from the spot; and felt very sensibly the affection he communicates. If he speaks of his humble shed, his flocks and his fleeces, he does not counterfeit the scene; who having (whether through choice or necessity, is not material) retired betimes to country solitudes, and sought his happiness in rural employments, has a right to consider himself as a real shepherd. The flocks, the meadows and the grottoes are _his own_, and the embellishment of his _farm_ his sole amusement. As the sentiments, therefore, were inspired by Nature, and that in the earlier part of his life, he hopes they will retain a natural appearance.” This plea for first-hand observation is important because it is the most direct of the early critical remarks on the poetical treatment of Nature.
Shenstone’s delight in Nature was evidently genuine. He grants that men may be dazzled by the city;
But soon the pageant fades away! ’Tis nature only bears perpetual sway,[354]
and they learn again
the simple, the sincere delight-- Th’ habitual scene of hill and dale, The rural herds, the vernal gale, The tangled vetch’s purple bloom, The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.[355]
He speaks with scorn of those “bounded souls” who enjoy in Nature only the satisfaction of present needs, or the prospect of future gain, and who cannot on “the mere landscape” feast their eyes, and apostrophizes them thus:
Athirst ye praise the limpid stream, ’tis true: But though, the pebbled shores among, It mimic no unpleasing song, The limpid fountain murmurs not for you. Unpleas’d ye see the thickets bloom, Unpleas’d the spring her flowery robe resume; Unmov’d the mountain’s airy pile, The dappled mead without a smile.
But to the true lover of Nature,
Lo! not an hedge-row hawthorn blows, Or humble harebell paints the plain, Or valley winds, or fountain flows, Or purple heath is ting’d in vain:
For such the rivers dash the foaming tides, The mountain swells, the dale subsides; Ev’n thriftless furze detains their wandering sight, And the rough, barren rock grows pregnant with delight.[356]
Shenstone also defends the doctrine that beauty is its own excuse for being.
Let yon admir’d carnation own, Not all was meant for raiment, or for food, Not all for needful use alone.[357]
Though Shenstone’s work is often undeniably tame and diffuse, and though his interests were bounded by his farm, he is of significance because of his thorough enjoyment of quiet country places, his indignant rejection of the utilitarian view of Nature, and his courageous plea for truth to English scenes.
Greene’s chief poem, “The Spleen,” was published in 1737, after his death. The subject is not one that would lead to much use of Nature, but there is at least one picture that cannot be passed over.[358] In his sketch of the ideal life he describes his ideal home. Its surroundings are most charming and natural, and the whole scene, in its unity and reality of effect, contrasts well with such fanciful combinations as the garden in Tickell’s “To a Lady before Marriage.” One line in this description,
Brown fields their fallow sabbaths keep,[359]
is remarkable in that, in so few words, it not only presents a complete picture, but also awakens the feeling that would be excited by the scene itself.
Hamilton’s chief use of Nature is in gentle little allegories of life. “The Rhone and the Arar,” though a description of two rivers, is obviously didactic in all its details. Spring, summer, and winter in Ode III are but “moral shows,” spread out for man’s instruction. Though Hamilton’s scenes are usually of the soft, delicious, vaguely pleasing sort, and his diction largely classical, yet now and then in his rather monotonous spring poetry we find a fresh line or phrase, as when he comments on spring’s gift of beauty to “each nameless field.” He finds joy in the prickly briar rose, the bright-colored weed, the lion’s yellow tooth, in a thousand flowers never sowed by art.[360] He is filled with gratitude as he looks upon the smiling face of Nature and the radiant glories of the sky, or listens to the music of the opening year.[361] In “Contemplation” he exclaims,
Mark how Nature’s hand bestows Abundant grace on all that grows, Tinges, with pencil slow unseen, The grass that clothes the valley green; Or spreads the tulip’s parted streaks.
More distinctive, however, than this love of the spring-time world, is Hamilton’s sense of communion with Nature. The lines,
As on this flowering turf I lie, My soul conversing with the sky,
and this address to the passions that tyrannize over him,
This grove annihilates you all. Oh power unseen, yet felt, appear! Sure something more than nature’s here,
are new evidences of the spirit that animated Lady Winchilsea, Dyer, and Parnell.
Hamilton’s most important poem is “The Braes of Yarrow.” In this ballad there is a remarkable blending of external Nature with the tragedy of love and death. The use of the phrase, “the Braes of Yarrow,” in the refrain adds a curiously subtle touch to the pathos of the poem. Tradition had so closely associated the sloping hills and the winding stream of Yarrow with stories of unhappy love in far-off days that the name was in itself enough to strike the keynote of pathos in Hamilton’s ballad. The tone or color that human experience had once given to the scenery was carried on by that scenery so that it became the appropriate background for a new tale of grief. The one descriptive stanza,
Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, Yellow on Yarrow’s banks the gowan, Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowan;
and a single line in the maiden’s lament,
I sang, my voice the woods returning,
are an appropriate setting for the happy love of the bonny bride and her comely swain. But Nature is also compelled, as it were, to share in the grief, and is implicated in the crime. On Yarrow’s rueful flood floats the body of the slain knight; her doleful hills echo the cries of sorrow. And the desolate bride prays that rain and dew may forever forsake the fields where her lover was so basely slain. The descriptive element in Hamilton’s ballad is of further interest as having suggested some of the details in Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Unvisited.”
“The Deity,” a poem by Samuel Boyse, and much praised in its own day,[362] is of importance here merely because of its Thomsonian imitations, and because of its conception of God in Nature. This conception is, in the main, the typical classical one, as in “Omnipotence,” where the central idea is,
What hand, Almighty Architect, but thine Could give the model of this vast design?
In “Providence,” however, the modified classical conception is apparent, the ever-working power of God being dwelt upon. All Nature is represented as being each moment derived from the Creator.
The sun from thy superior radiance bright Eternal sheds his delegated light; Thou shedd’st the tepid morning’s balmy dews,
are characteristic lines.
That Boyse was an admirer of Thomson we know from the lines addressed to him,
When nature first inspired thy early strain To paint the beauties of the flowery plain; The charming page I read with soft delight, And every lively landskip charmed my sight.[363]
In reading Boyse it is difficult to point out exact echoes from Thomson, but the impression remains that certain passages, especially in “Glory,” are, in spite of their couplets, but weak paraphrases of some portions of Thomson’s work, noticeably “The Hymn.”
Young’s literary career lasted from 1713 to 1762. His “Ocean” and “Sea Pieces” and the only book of the “Night Thoughts” (1742–45), in which there is much use of external Nature, have already been briefly characterized. They need little further discussion here. The preface to “Ocean” is more worthy of note than the poem itself. In this preface Young deprecates slavish following of the models of antiquity, declaring that “originals only have true life.” Due deference to the great standards of antiquity requires that “the motives and fundamental method of their working” should be imitated rather than the works themselves. He then defends his choice of the ocean as a subject, saying that it is, like the subjects chosen by the ancients, both national and great, and adds the significant phrase, “and (what is strange) hitherto unsung.” “The crude ore of romanticism” which Mr. Gosse finds in Young, has to do with his despairing attitude toward life and death, not with his attitude toward external Nature. His love of darkness, which seems at first thought akin to the sentimental melancholy of the romantic poetry, is really an unemotional choice of a fit background for his visions of gloom. His strongest lines on night represent not its beauty, nor its melancholy, but its divinity, or, rather, its theological import. The following are typical:
Let Indians ... ... the sun adore: _Darkness_ has more divinity for me; It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul To settle on herself.[364]
By night an atheist half-believes a God.[365]
At night the sense of sacred quiet is “the felt presence of the deity.”[366] In occasional passages Young has more or less definite previsions of scattered ideas in later poetry,[367] but these are incidental, and of merely curious interest. Taken in the bulk, his work is so slightly and coldly concerned with the outer world as to offer no real contribution to the new feeling for Nature.
Collins possesses many of the qualities and the defects of the romantic spirit. He made plans almost as comprehensive and visionary as those of Coleridge. His indolence, his wavering, irresolute disposition, his morbid sensitiveness, the intensity of his emotions, his love of liberty, his passion for “high romance and Gothic diableries,” together with his new sense of the mystery of Nature, set him quite apart from the men who were his friends, from Dr. Johnson, Armstrong, Aaron Hill, from Garrick, Quin, and Foote, even from Thomson. His interests were not those of his day, for his admiration turned to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, rather than to Virgil and Horace.[368] In English poetry he gave his allegiance to Spenser, Milton, and Shakspere, rather than to Dryden and Pope.[369] He was devoted to music. He was also deeply interested in the remote history of his own country, and in the legendary lore and superstitions of any land. Dr. Johnson says of him: “He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens.”
Collins was a town-bred poet and could have known little of the country at first hand. We might therefore expect all his imagery to be of the conventional sort in the “Eclogues” written in his early school days. But such is not the case. In the later poems the use of Nature, slight as it is, is marked by unusual originality and imaginative power. There is everywhere present a sense of delight in the wilder, freer, in the more remote and mysterious, aspects of Nature. He makes Fear sit
in some hollow’d seat ’Gainst which the big waves beat,
and listen to
Drowning seamen’s cries in tempest brought.
His gifted wizard seers
view the lurid signs that cross the sky Where in the west the brooding tempests lie, And hear their first, faint, rustling pennons sweep.
Note also the description of the “wide, wild storm,” in the “Ode to Liberty,” and especially the skilful mingling of landscape details and superstitious terrors in the “Ode on Popular Superstitions.” The “bewitch’d, low, marshy, willow brake,” “the spot where hums the sedgy reed,” the “dim hill that seems up-rising near,” “Uist’s dark forest,” “the watery strath or quaggy moss,” “the damp, dark fen,” are slight touches, but they serve perfectly to suggest the fit home of the kelpie, the will-o’-the-wisp, the mischievous fairy folk, and the phantom train of gliding ghosts. But Collins’ most appreciative use of Nature is in the “Ode to Evening (1746).” That poem was doubtless the result of personal experience, for it notes facts, such as the rising of the beetle in the path at twilight, that were not yet stock poetical property. The lines,
Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil,
could hardly have been written by one unfamiliar with the slow disappearance of a landscape as night comes on. More remarkable are the simplicity and directness of touch by which the few details are made to stand for complete pictures. The cloudy sunset, the silence of evening, the calm lake amid the upland fallows, the fading view, the windy day in autumn, are all excellent examples of the stimulative as opposed to the delineative description. But the final impression made on the mind is powerful mainly because in some way that escapes analysis the very mood and spirit of evening, its calm, its tender melancholy, breathe through the unpretending lines. We seldom find in the eighteenth century, personifications so high and spiritual, description so essentially poetical, or workmanship so perfect in its simplicity.
Dr. Akenside’s “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” though not published till 1744, was begun in 1738 when the author was but seventeen, and completed when he was twenty-one. In 1757 it was remodeled and many additions were made. In its first form the poem was essentially a product of the author’s precocious, brilliant youth. Yet it has little of the fire and passion of youth. It is a smooth, correct, rather frigid exposition of certain philosophical principles. The whole poem seems like an illustration of Akenside’s belief that poetry is true eloquence in meter.[370] It is not marked by any especially rich or faithful portrayal of Nature, nor is there much description. In point of fact, such descriptions as occur are often marred by eighteenth-century periphrases such as calling honey “ambrosial spoils;” the sun, “the radiant ruler of the year;” flowers, “the purple honors of the spring;” water, “a delicious draught of cool refreshment;” and frogs, “the grave, unwieldly inmates of the neighboring pond.” There is also frequent use of stock words and of worn-out similitudes. But in spite of its coldness, this poem is an important contribution to the development of the poetry of Nature because of its new conception of the relation between man and Nature.
When the poet endeavors to explore the “secret paths of early genius,” he imagines inspiration as coming to the lonely youth from some “wild river’s brink at eve,” or from “solemn groves at noon,”[371] and there is one passage that lays a Wordsworthian emphasis on the effect of Nature on the soul of a child:
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook The rocky pavement and the mossy falls Of solitary Wensbeck’s limpid stream; How gladly I recall your well-known seats Beloved of old, and that delightful time When, all alone, for many a summer’s day, I wandered through your calm recesses, led In silence by some powerful hand unseen. Nor will I e’er forget you; nor shall e’er The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim Those studies which possessed me in the dawn Of life, and fix’d the color of my mind For every future year.[372]
But the great scene of Nature does not appear the same to all. It is only to the finer spirits that the true meaning of the outer world is revealed.[373] These nobler souls are all “naked and alive”[374] to the influences of Nature to which they respond as Memnon’s image to the touch of the morning.[375] Form, color, sound, motion, detain the enlivened sense, and soon the soul perceives the deep concord between these attributes of matter and the mind of man.[376] The passions are lulled to a divine repose. The intellect itself suspends its graver cares. Love and joy alone possess the soul
Whom nature’s aspect, nature’s simple garb, Can thus command.[377]
For the happy man whom neither sordid wealth nor the gaudy spoils of honor can seduce to leave the sweets of Nature,
Each passing hour sheds tribute from her wings: And still new beauties meet his lonely walk, And loves unfelt attract him.... ... Nor thence partakes Fresh pleasure only; for the attentive mind, By this harmonious action on her powers, Becomes herself harmonious; wont so oft In outward things to meditate the charm Of sacred order, soon she seeks at home To find a kindred order, to exert Within herself this elegance of love.[378]
If men feel themselves cramped by custom, by sordid policies, let them appeal
to Nature, to the winds And rolling waves, the sun’s unwearied course, The elements and seasons.
All these call us to beneficent activity.
Thus the men Whom Nature’s works can charm, with God himself Hold converse; grow familiar, day by day, With his conceptions, act upon his plan, And form to his the relish of their souls.[379]
But even the susceptible soul must come to Nature in an open, receptive mood. The sacred rites of the Naiads are sought in vain by the “eyes of care.” No vision is granted to the preoccupied guest.[380] There is also an independent life in Nature, or at least a spirit that is no reflection of man’s moods, but with qualities of its own whereby man is influenced.
Throned in the sun’s descending car, What power unseen diffuseth far This tenderness of mind? What Genius smiles on yonder flood? What God, in whispers from the wood, Bids every thought be kind?[381]
Who can tell, Even on the surface of this rolling earth, How many make abode? The fields, the groves, The winding rivers and the azure main, Are rendered solemn by their frequent feet, Their rites sublime.[382]
The power of Nature over man is constant and varied. She is endowed with such enchantment, made up of forms so exquisitely fair, breathed through with such ethereal sweetness, that she can at will “raise or depress the impassioned soul.”[383] Her dark woods rouse him to solemn awe. Her gay landscapes with blue skies and silver clouds give an impression of winning mirth. There is in the rising sun something kindred to man’s spirit. At evening the “breath divine of nameless joy,” that steals through the heart, is but another message from the spirit of love that rules the world. All the forms of the external world are but visible expressions of such thoughts of God as the mind of man is fitted to receive. The soundness of this interpretation of Nature is not here in question. We are merely concerned with the fact that in the middle of the century we find a statement of poetical creed which, so far as the thought is concerned, might come from “The Excursion” or “The Prelude.” Akenside is one of the first of the poets of the age to insist on the beauty of all Nature,[384] and to show an abiding sense of the spiritual elements that give significance to the external forms of Nature. He was also the first one to emphasize the platonic doctrine of the identity of truth and beauty,
For Truth and Good are one; And Beauty dwells in them, and they in her.[385]
A minor poet, John Gilbert Cooper, must be mentioned because of one poem, “The Power of Harmony” (1745). In execution it is heavy and involved. It is a clumsy attempt to work out a theory of beauty. The preface is more interesting than the poem. In this preface he says: “It is the design of the poem to show that constant attention to what is perfect and beautiful in Nature will, by degrees, harmonize the soul to a responsive regularity and sympathetic order.” In the poem he ascribes to “each natural scene a moral power,” and traces even the song of birds and the frisking of cattle to the effect
Of beauty beaming its benignant warmth Through all the brute creation.
He believes also that all parts of Nature are beautiful. Shagged rocks, barren heaths, precipices, sable woods, headlong rivers, all are examples of the principle of harmony and so of beauty.
Somewhat earlier in the period is another minor poet who would be today practically unknown had not Southey preserved his work. This is Joseph Relph, the son of a Cumberland statesman. He was born in Shergham, where he spent most of his unhappy life. His “Cumbrian Pastorals” were, Southey says, transcripts from real life. They are among the very earliest attempts to represent the Cumberland dialect, and they are a close record of Cumberland superstitions and games and customs. The poems show an original study of the scenery about Shergham, as in the following lines:
A finer hay-day was never seen, The greenish sops already luik less green
* * * * *
And see how finely striped the fields appear, Striped like the gown ’at I on Sundays wear. White show the rye, the big of blaker hue; The bluimen pezz greenment wi’ reed and blue.
Blair’s one important poem is “The Grave” (1743). Its aim is a moral one, and it makes but slight use of the outer world. There is, however, one interesting realistic description of a row of ragged elms
Long lash’d by the rude winds. Some rift half down Their branchless trunks; others so thin atop, That scarce two crows could lodge in the same tree.
These elms, the cheerless unsocial yew, the wan moon, the howling wind, the screech owl, the moss-grown stones skirted with nettles, are descriptive details that serve very well to add the desired “supernumerary horror” to the scene. “The Grave” is one of the earliest poems to give to melancholy reflections on man’s mortality the Nature setting that was later recognized as the conventionally appropriate one.
William Thompson is best known by his “Epithalamium” (1736), “Sickness” (1745) and especially his “Hymn to May,” written “not long after.” His poems were published in a volume in 1757. His “Milkmaid” is a stilted, artificial pastoral filled in with homely details. Colin begs politely and on his knees that Lucy will smile upon him;
So may thy cows forever crown With floods of milk thy brimming pail; So may thy cheeze all cheeze surpass, So may thy butter never fail.
Lucy, of course, sighed and blushed a sweet consent. This pastoral, together with his admiration of Pope’s Alexis, who was so
Gently rural! without coarseness plain; How simple in his elegance of grief! A shepherd but no clown,
would hardly lead one to suspect much satisfactory study of Nature in Thompson’s poetry. But there is apparent in the “Hymn” and even in “Sickness,” through all the florid, exuberant diction and obscure forms of expression, a genuine delight in the beauty and freshness of the outer world. He was a great admirer of Thomson, who as
Nature’s bard the seasons on his page Stole from the year’s rich hand,[386]
and his poems show Thomson’s influence in expression and general conception. Such phrases as the “boundless majesty of day,” the “sun’s refulgent throne,” the “vernant showery bow profusive,” clouds of “ten thousand inconsistent shapes,” are suggestive. Here is a typical Thomsonian passage:
What boundless tides of splendor o’er the skies, O’er flowing brightness! stream their golden rays! Heaven’s azure kindles with the varying dyes.[387]
Or take this one:
And what a prospect round Swells greenly grateful on the cherish’d eye; A universal blush, a waste of sweets![388]
There are many other suggestions of Thomson in these “tender and florid” descriptions of “the beauties, the pleasures, and the loves” of spring. William Thompson is of importance in this study merely because he is one more poet who loved Nature, who wrote of her with enthusiasm, and who imitated Thomson. His chief use of Nature is in similitudes and in frequent enthusiastic summaries of the charms of Nature.
Moses Mendes published in 1751 four poems named in imitation of Thomson, “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter.” There is some first-hand observation in such lines as,
The pool-sprung gnat on sounding wings doth pass And on the ramping steed doth suck his fill,
or,
The patient cow doth, to eschew the heat, Her body steep within the neighboring rill;
but more often the observations are of the conventional imitative sort, as in this couplet:
On every hill the purple-blushing vine Beneath her leaves her racy fruit doth hide,
which is hardly true of an English scene. On the whole the passages in which Mendes treats of Nature, while rather fanciful and decorative, are not indicative of any real knowledge of Nature.
Jago’s most important poems are “Edge Hill” (1767), “The Swallow” (1748), “The Blackbirds” (1753), and “The Goldfinches.” The last two are love stories of the birds named, each love story being disastrously ended by the cruelty of man in taking innocent life. “The Swallow” is an allegory of life and death. “Edge Hill” is notable for its pleasure in wide views which are minutely traced, and, alas, made “generally interesting by reflections, historical, philosophical, and moral.” The new note is struck by the exceptional frequency and evident appreciation with which the poet notes the mountains in the different views. Of “Dafset’s ridgy mountain,” he says,
Like the tempest-driven wave, Irregularly great, his bare tops brave The winds.
To the west
Braids lifts his scarry sides, And Ilmington, and Campden’s hoary hills Impress new grandeur on the spreading scene,
* * * * *
While distant, but distinct, his Alpine ridge Malvern erects o’er Esham’s vale sublime.
In 1750 appeared Francis Coventry’s “Pens-hurst,” a poem in rhymed octosyllabics, notable chiefly for its many imitations of Milton. Another poem written by Coventry to the Honorable Wilmot Vaughan indicates that the two friends had found some pleasure in mountain climbing:
Dost thou explore Sabrina’s fountful source, Where huge Plinlimmon’s hoary height ascends: Then downwards mark her vagrant course ’Till mixed with clouds the landscape ends? Dost thou revere the hallowed soil Where Druids old sepulchred lie? Or up cold Snowden’s craggy summits toil And muse on ancient savage liberty? Ill suit such walks with bleak autumnal air.
In the “World,” April 12, 1753, Coventry also had an article entitled “Strictures on the absurd Novelties introduced in Gardening,” which was a plea for simplicity and naturalness.
William Mason, who is a poet known chiefly because he had insight enough to appreciate Gray, may, in this study, be lightly passed over. His dramas “Elfrida” (1752), and “Caractacus” (1759) were written on the model of the ancient Greek tragedy. They have little to do with external Nature, although in order to introduce “touches of pastoral description” such as had especially delighted him in “Comus” and “As You Like It” he had laid the scene of “Elfrida” in “an old romantic forest.” “Caractacus” is a Druid play the action of which takes place on or near “majestic Snowden,” but there is only a single passage in which the wild scenery is made effective in the poem, and that is the ode beginning,
Mona on Snowden calls; Hear, thou King of Mountains, hear.
Later on the ode allies itself with romantic work by its use of the supernatural but it makes slight use of Nature. Mason’s chief significance in this study is in what he had to say about gardens. In “To a Water Nymph” (1747), there is a protest against the elaborate Gothic fountains then fashionable, and also against shell work and mineral grottoes. His long work, “The English Garden,” will be spoken of later.
The greatest name in this period is that of Thomas Gray. His prose will be taken up under “Travels.” His poetry falls into three periods.[389] The first or classical period, in spite of an occasional good line, such as
The untaught harmony of Spring,
is entirely conventional in its use of Nature, the prevailing tone being exemplified in such phrases as “the attic warbler,” “the purple year,” and “Venus’ train.” But in the two poems of 1742–50, we find close and appreciative study of the country about Windsor and Stoke Pogis. In the ode on “Eton College” the wistful pleasure with which the poet recalls his childhood is intensified by his memory of the beloved hills and fields, the silver-winding stream, and the pleasant paths inseparably associated with the care-free days of his youth. In the “Elegy” the use of Nature is highly artistic. The purpose of the poem is a human one--the sympathetic representation of the honorable labor, the innocent joys, the tender and wholesome affections of the poor, the general tone being that of a pensive melancholy induced by the thought of death. Nature is used in due subordination to the theme, and with exquisite fitness. Every detail of the opening twilight picture contributes its own touch to prepare the mind for the succeeding reflections on death. The sounds, the tinkling of the distant folds, the droning of the beetle, the complaining of the owl, are such as emphasize silence, which is itself an accompaniment and an emblem of death. The ivy-mantled tower, the rugged elms, the black yews, have been immemorially associated with death. There is also a subtle analogy in the withdrawal of light, the life of Nature. So, too, each detail in the first picture of morning, has its human purpose. The stirring sounds are interesting and of pathetic import because they once waked an answering throb of life in the hearts of men who now hear them no more. The enumeration of homely country tasks has its chief value in the suggested delight of the workman in his occupation and the resultant emphasis by contrast on the pathos of death.
In the last six stanzas of the poem we find the true romantic conception of the relation between man and Nature. The poet is represented as a shy, solitary being in communion with Nature, and drawing his inspiration from her. In the morning he hurries to some hillside that he may watch the sunrise; at noon he stretches himself at full length under some beech-tree by the side of a brook, and pores over the waters as they babble by; or he wanders through the woods, murmuring to himself his wayward fancies. This poet is certainly far enough removed from the typical town-bred poet of the classical régime. He is rather of the same race as Warton’s Enthusiast, and he at least suggests Wordsworth’s Poet who murmurs by the running brooks a music sweeter than their own.[390] In these stanzas Nature is not only the appropriate dramatic background. It is taken up into the mental action and becomes at least in part the occasion of the poet’s moods, and it is entirely through the relation of the poet to Nature that these moods are revealed to the reader.
Nature is thus throughout the poem made strictly subservient to the human theme, but the intrinsic beauty of the brief descriptions, quite apart from the context, cannot pass unnoticed. Separate lines have the power of suggesting whole pictures. For example in
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke,
the ringing blow of the ax, the crash of the falling tree, smite upon the ear. The stanza beginning
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield
suggests several themes for the landscape artist. There is also a wide, peaceful landscape effect in
The lowing herds wind slowly o’er the lea.
And the line
The swallow twittering from its straw-built shed
brings up all the details of a humble farmyard. These and other descriptions in the “Elegy” are distinctively English in spirit and detail. They are the result of first-hand knowledge, they are drawn with a firm hand, and they are used with an instinctive recognition of artistic fitness.
A new range of sympathies, however, appears in the poems of Gray’s third or purely romantic period. Here he writes of northern mythologies and superstitions or gives transcripts of Norse tales, and the pictures interwoven with the human elements are of a wild and savage character. In “The Bard,” mountain, precipice, and torrent form a setting without which the fiery denunciation of the poet would lose half its force. The storm and the whirlwind sweep through these poems. Rough and frowning steeps, foaming floods, warring winds, the heights of Snowdon and huge Plinlimmon, darkness, cold, make up the terrible but dramatically appropriate environment for the fierce, imprecatory elegy which the bard utters over his lost companions, for the fatal and dreadful song of the gigantic sisters weaving “the loom of Hell.”
In one or two other poems there is effective use of Nature. The joy of a convalescent able at last to go out of doors was not an uncommon subject through this period, but there is no better expression of it than in “A Fragment” by Gray. The feeling, and in passages, the phraseology, are almost Wordsworthian.
The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise,
is an illustrative stanza. There are also some exquisite lines on birds, as,
But chief, the Sky-lark warbles high His trembling thrilling ecstacy; And, lessening from the dazzled sight, Melts into air and liquid light,[391]
and,
There pipes the wood-lark, and the song-thrush there Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air.[392]
Though undated these lines in their spirit and workmanship ally themselves at once with the period of the “Elegy” rather than with the later work. They also accurately represent Gray’s dominant attitude toward Nature, his knowledge of sweet, homely things, and the delicate perfection of his literary touch.
The Rev. R. Potter’s chief poem is “A Farewell Hymn to the Country, Attempted in the Manner of Spenser’s Epithalamion” (1749). The poem shows much sympathetic knowledge of some parts of Nature, especially of birds and trees. He speaks of the quail that “runnes piping o’er the land,” of the “mavis-haunted grove,” and of the nightingale that delights “the stillness of the night.” He declares that his entire orchard, plums, pears, grapes, permains, and all, is at the service of these, his “fellow-poets.” At evening
The slumb’ring trees seem their tall tops to bow Rocking the careless birds that on them nest To gentle, gentle rest.
He does not often refer to specific trees, but he gives little suggestive pictures as of “the uncertain shaded grove,” or
the doubtfull shade By quivering branches made,
or of delightful resting places roofed with “inwoven branches.” The stream for which he cared most was “the gentle Tave” in Norfolk. He mentions many flowers, but in no new or finely descriptive manner. His sensitiveness to perfumes we may see in such lines as,
Sweet is the breath of heaven with day-spring born,
Where the fresh hay-cock breathes along the mead,
or in such phrases as “this flowre-perfumed aire.” The poem is rich in color, as in the descriptions of sunrise, and of various kinds of fruit.
Though it would be difficult to quote specific lines to prove the statement, it is nevertheless true that the whole poem conveys in a quite unusual degree a sense of warm, abiding affection for the simple scenes of the country. “Smit with the peaceful joys of lowly life,” he gives thanks for “the unmoved quiet of his silver daies,” and thinks with dread of “the cares and pains in mad cities.” His use of Nature is almost entirely in a running assemblage of sweet sights and sounds to justify his preference for country life.
Another of the minor poets of this period is Dr. John Dalton. In 1755 he wrote a “Descriptive Poem,” inscribed to “Two Ladies, the Daughters of Lord Lonsdale.” It is long, rambling, tedious, but it is of historical importance as being probably the first poetical tribute to the beauty of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
Then change the scene: to Nature’s pride, Sweet Keswick’s vale, the Muse will guide. The Muse, who trod th’ enchanted ground, Who sail’d the wonderous lake around, With you will haste once more to hail The beauteous brook of Borrodale.
He speaks of the streams that
rejoice to roar Down the rough rocks of dread Lodore,
and says that
Horrors like these at first alarm, But soon with savage grandeur charm, And raise to noblest thoughts your mind. Thus by thy fall, Lodore, reclin’d, The cragged cliff, inpendent wood, Whose shadows mix o’er half the flood, The gloomy clouds, which solemn sail, Scarce lifted by the languid gale O’er the cap’d hill and darken’d vale
* * * * *
I view with wonder and delight, A pleasing tho’ an awful sight.
Of Keswick and Skiddaw he writes,
Thy roofs, O Keswick, brighter rise! The lake and lofty hills between, Where giant Skiddow shuts the scene.
Supreme of mountains, Skiddow, hail! To whom all Britain sinks a vale!
Lo, his imperial brow, I see From foul usurping vapors free! ’Twere glorious now his side to climb, Boldly to scale his top sublime.
There are several passages in the poem indicative of Dr. Dalton’s unusually close study of streams, especially those near Lowther Castle, and in the picturesque valley of Borrowdale. With evident delight he traces the stream from its mountain source, over tuneful falls, under broad spreading boughs, along silent meadows, to the wide lake. There is also a fine passage descriptive of a patriarchal oak near Lowther. It is the first sustained description of a specific tree with anything like the modern feeling. It is represented as standing in a “sunny plain alone.” Its reverend age, its majesty, are especially dwelt upon. The poem shows some excellent first-hand observation. Dr. Dalton is ahead of Wordsworth in noticing the “azure roofs” of the lowly cottages. And he should have the credit of discovering the beauty of the vale of Derwentwater, and the majesty of giant Skiddaw, fourteen years before Gray made his famous tour, and nearly half a century before the Lake poets set up their monopoly.
The most important work of this period was doubtless that of the Warton brothers. Their father was also a poet, and he struck the romantic note in his hatred of city life and his longing for solitude in the country. Joseph Warton had a long literary career during which he edited books, wrote poems, and contributed articles to periodicals. Those of his poems that were of especial note in the history of Romanticism were written early in life, between 1740 and 1753. “The Enthusiast” (1740), “Odes on Various Subjects” (1746), and “Ode on Mr. West’s Translation of Pindar” (1744) are the chief ones to be studied. In these poems there are many summaries of such objects in Nature as give pleasure, but there is little actual description. In details and phraseology there are frequent echoes from Milton and Thomson.[393]
In general, though unoriginal in expression, the poems are marked by an unmistakably genuine love of Nature, and of Nature untouched by man. The poet dislikes Versailles whose fountains cast
The tortur’d waters to the distant heav’ns.[394]
Even Kent--
Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns Formality and method, round and square Disdaining, plans irregularly great,[395]
cannot design like Nature. No gardens however artfully adorned can charm like “unfrequented meads and pathless wilds.” The poet finds peculiar pleasure in all the wild, solitary, mournful aspects of Nature. He loves “hollow winds” and “ever-beating waves,” and hoary mountains where
Nature seems to sit alone.[396]
He wishes for
some pine-top’d precipice Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream Like Anio, tumbling, roars; or some black heath Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, Or yew-tree scath’d.[397]
He escapes from the hated city’s “tradeful hum” and seeks for solitude at “the deep dead of night” under the pale light of the moon. He is alive to all the mysterious, romantic suggestions of Nature. He is charmed by the little dancing fays that sip night-dews and “laugh and love” in the dales. In storms he hears demons and goblins shrieking through the dark air. He is also deeply conscious of the effect of Nature on man. He finds himself even oppressed by the boundless charms of “brooks, hill, meadow, dale,” and it is his belief that all Nature conspires
To raise, to soothe, to harmonize the mind.
Nature can give happiness beyond that of luxury or gratified ambition. These poems mark a new phase in the feeling toward Nature, because, with little description, with no theory to propound, no moral to teach, no human interest to exemplify, the poet with a rapt fervor and intensity cries out for solitary communion with Nature as a necessity of his own being. Warton is also, I think, the first of the romantic poets to advocate a return to Nature in the sense in which Rousseau used the phrase:
Happy the first of men, ere yet confin’d To smoaky cities; who in sheltering groves, Warm caves, and deep-sunk vallies liv’d and lov’d. Yet why should man mistaken deem it nobler To dwell in palaces and high-roof’d halls, Than in God’s forests, architect supreme![398]
Joseph Warton’s exceptionally strong love of Nature is emphasized by the testimony of Bowles who traces his own love of Nature to companionship with Dr. Warton, and by the testimony of his brother Thomas in a poem, “An Ode Sent to a Friend.” In this poem Thomas Warton tells of his brother’s delight in walks at morning and evening through unfrequented grassy lanes, or in the deep forest, or up steep hills “to view the length of landscape ever new.”
A part of the service which Warton rendered to the poetry of Nature rests in the fact that he led the attention from Pope to poets who had treated of Nature with imaginative power. He had only scorn for
The fearful, frigid lays of cold and creeping Art,
“the courtly silken lay,” “the polished lyrics,” of his own day. But it is in his prose that we find the best evidence of his break with the classicists. In the dedication prefixed to the “Essay on Pope” (1756) he divided English poets into four classes, putting in the first class only Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton. Of Pope he said, “I revere the memory of Pope; I respect and honor his abilities, but I do not think him at the head of his profession.” He then proceeded to show the difference “betwixt a man of wit, a man of sense, and a true poet.” In the first and second sections of the “Essay” he minutely discusses Pope’s descriptive poetry showing that his idea of pastoral poetry as representing some golden age was but “an empty notion,” and commenting severely on his mixture of British and Grecian ideas. He condemns “Windsor Forest” because its images are “equally applicable to any place whatsoever.” In contrast with Pope he puts Thomson, of whose “Seasons” he gives a most discriminating eulogy. It is too long to quote entire, but a part of it must be given if only to show its remarkably modern tone.
Thomson was blessed with a strong and copious fancy; he hath enriched poetry with a variety of new and original images, which he painted from nature itself, and from his own actual observations; his descriptions have, therefore, a distinctness and truth, which are utterly wanting to those of poets who have only copied from each other, and have never looked abroad on the objects themselves. Thomson was accustomed to wander away into the country for days, and for weeks, attentive to “each rural sight, each rural sound,” while many a poet, who has dwelt for years in the Strand, has attempted to describe fields and rivers, and generally succeeded accordingly. Hence that nauseous repetition of the same circumstances; hence that disgusting impropriety of introducing what may be called a set of hereditary images, without proper regard to the age, or climate, or occasion in which they were formerly used.... And if our poets would accustom themselves to contemplate fully every object, before they attempted to describe it, they would not fail of giving their readers more new and complete images than they generally do.[399]
Wordsworth himself was hardly more emphatic in his scorn of vague descriptions and hereditary images, and in his plea for simple truth to Nature. The passages already quoted are sufficient to show how self-conscious and theoretical was Warton’s romanticism. He was not, however, so far as the study of Nature alone is concerned, the first self-conscious worker in the new field. Ramsay and Shenstone had already, apologetically to be sure, but none the less distinctly, entered their protest against the conventional imitations of their day. But Warton uttered no apology. His theory was fully established in his own mind. He came down on the classicists with hammer and tongs, and enunciated in 1756 at least two of the cardinal doctrines of the poets of Nature who wrote forty years later.
Thomas Warton’s poems seem at first reading to be but a patchwork of phrases from Milton.[400] “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1745) was written when he was but seventeen. The theme of this poem is a defense of solitude against various social pleasures, and it has the customary note of delight in darkness, tombs, pale shrines, “fav’rite midnight haunts,” “pale December’s foggy glooms,” and “the pitying moon.” “The First of April,” “Ode on the Approach of Summer,” and “Morning, an Ode,” are of more importance so far as the love of Nature is concerned. The lines on the opening spring show close observation.
Reluctant comes the timid spring.
Fringing the forest’s devious edge Half rob’d appears the hawthorn hedge.
Scant along the ridgy land The beans their new-born ranks expand.
The rooks swarm with clamorous call and
Wreathe their capacious nests anew.
The fisher “bursting through the crackling sedge”
Startles from the bordering wood The bashful wild-duck’s early brood.
And so loud the blackbird sings That far and near the valley rings.
He notes also the kite that sails above the crowded roof of the dove-cote, the plumy crest of thistles, the russet tints and gleams of light in the tops of trees at sunset, the faint, varying shades of green when the new foliage appears on the trees, and the blue tint of the unchanging pine standing in their midst. Warton’s pleasure in wide views is indicated in several passages where he speaks of climbing a hill for the sake of the broad prospect of field and stream. He had also an appreciation of wild Nature, as we see from the descriptions in “The Grave of King Arthur.” Warton’s work is of interest because of the many attractive details scattered through his poems, but there is little unity of effect. The general impression is that he saw Nature first through Milton’s eyes, and that when he afterward made many charming discoveries for himself he tried to express them in the “Il Penseroso” manner.
His chief influence was through his “Observations on the Faerie Queen” and in his “History of Poetry,” but except as attention was thus directed to older writers, these works had no effect on the poetry of Nature.
In Joseph Warton’s “Enthusiast” (1740) the love of solitary communion with Nature was supreme. About fourteen years later appeared William Whitehead’s “Enthusiast,” which is of interest here because it shows so well the typical eighteenth-century view in contrast to the pure romanticism of Warton. In Whitehead’s “Enthusiast” the poet yields instinctively to the new spirit, but is suddenly recalled to himself, is rendered sane by the wise admonitions of Reason. It is a bright day in May. The poet, entranced by the beauty about him, walks forth,
With loit’ring steps regardless where, So soft, so genial was the air, So wond’rous bright the day.
And now my eyes with transport rove O’er all the blue expanse above, Unbroken by a cloud! And now beneath delighted pass, Where, winding through the deep-green grass, A full-brim’d river flow’d.
These, these are joys alone, I cry; ’Tis here, divine Philosophy, Thou deign’st to fix thy throne! Here Contemplation points the road Through Nature’s charms to Nature’s God! These, these are joys alone!
Then Reason whispers “monitory strains,” and teaches the Enthusiast that “light, and shade, and warmth, and air,” that the “philosophic calmness,” the visionary sense of “universal love,” which come to man from Nature, must sink into insignificance before the exalted joys of Virtue, and reminds the poet that “man was made for man.” The intrinsic value of this poem is slight, but it is noteworthy because we see the two tendencies contending for mastery. Whitehead was no poet. He simply reflected in a turbid fashion what more original men were saying. His tolerably full statement of the romantic attitude toward Nature, with his subsequent assertion of the triumphant good sense of classicism is, therefore, valuable testimony to the twofold spirit of the age.
In general we may say that we find during this period, rural didactic poetry treating of English subjects in the manner of John Philips in “Cyder,” as in Somerville and Smart. There is good local color in some descriptive poems as in Shenstone, Gray, Dr. Dalton, and Relph. There is throughout the period first-hand observation, but it is not so abundant, nor is the openness of the poet’s mind to sensuous impression so apparent as in some preceding work. There is, however, delicate and poetic handling of material as in the poems of Gray and Collins and Greene. There is a self-conscious endeavor to break away from ancient models, as in Ramsay’s “Preface” and Shenstone’s “Preface,” and from existing poetic domination as in Warton’s protest against Pope. Truth to Nature, independence of observation, as necessary poetic qualities, are for the first time openly and theoretically insisted on in Warton’s “Essay.” There is scorn of the utilitarian view of Nature, as in Shenstone. The debt of man to Nature is dwelt upon with new emphasis by Young, Shenstone, and especially Akenside. The sense of a divine spirit in Nature is clearly expressed by Akenside, and less clearly by Young. The purely romantic love of Nature in connection with sentimental melancholy is fully exemplified in Joseph Warton. There is strong personal enthusiasm for Nature in Shenstone, Akenside, and Joseph Warton. There is love of animals in Shenstone and Jago. There is notable representation of country people in Relph and Gray and Somerville.
THE PERIOD FROM 1756 TO 1798
From the “Essay on Pope” to the “Lyrical Ballads” is a long period but any subdivision would be purely arbitrary. It is chiefly characterized by the development and emphasis of influences already manifestly operant. The most valuable work is that of James Macpherson (1736–96), James Beattie (1735–1803), Robert Burns (1759–96), William Cowper (1731–1800), William Blake (1757–1827), and George Crabbe (1754–1832). Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) is of less importance. John Brown (1715–66), John Langhorne (1735–79), Christopher Smart (1722–71), John Logan (1748–88), and William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850), though minor poets, are significant in their poetry of Nature. Of less note are William Julius Mickle (1735–88), James Grainger (1724–66), Michael Bruce (1746–67), James Graeme (1749–72), John Scott (1730–83), and Richard Cumberland (1732–1811).
John Brown, otherwise unimportant, is interesting because of his early appreciation of the scenery of the English lakes. He wrote a description of Keswick[401] in a letter to Lyttleton, and his undated “Fragment of a Rhapsody Written at the Lakes of Westmoreland” is probably the outcome of the same visit. The “Fragment” is short and may be quoted entire as well because of its beauty, as because of its subject and early date:
Now sunk the sun, now twilight sunk, and night Rode in her zenith; nor a passing breeze Sigh’d to the groves, which in the midnight air Stood motionless; and in the peaceful floods Inverted hung; for now the billow slept Along the shore, nor heav’d the deep, but spread A shining mirror to the moon’s pale orb, Which, dim and waning, o’er the shadowy cliffs, The solemn woods and spiry mountain tops Her glimmering faintness threw. Now every eye Oppress’d with toil, was drown’d in deep repose, Save that the unseen shepherd in his watch, Propt on his crook, stood listening by the fold, And gaz’d the starry vault and pendant moon. Nor voice nor sound broke on the deep serene But the soft murmur of swift gushing rills, Forth issuing from the mountain’s distant steep (Unheard till now, and now scarce heard) proclaimed All things at rest, and imag’d the still voice Of quiet whispering to the ear of night.
For a curious coincidence compare Wordsworth’s lines written thirty years later:
The song of mountain streams, unheard by day, Now hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way.
John Langhorne was born at Kirby-Stephen in Westmoreland. His best poems were published in 1766, though his “Fables of Flora” did not appear till 1771. Langhorne had an enthusiastic personal love for Nature. He dwelt with rapture on stream and flower and field and sky.[402] His wish was,
Oh let me still with simple nature live, My lowly field flowers on her altar lay; Enjoy the blessings that she meant to give And calmly waste my inoffensive day.[403]
Or again,
Slow let me climb the mountain’s airy brow; The green height gained, in museful rapture lie, Sleep to the murmur of the woods below Or look to nature with a lover’s eye.[404]
His preference for Nature untouched by art is seen in the charming little “Fable”[405] showing the superiority of the wild rose to the more splendid cultivated rose. And in another “Fable” he says,
Come let us leave the painted plain, This waste of flowers that palls the eye; The walks of nature’s wilder reign Shall please in plainer majesty.[406]
That he had a tender feeling toward animals is shown by his poems on birds and by his protest against the cruelty of confining birds in cages. The most striking characteristic of Langhorne’s poems is his direct expression of the excellence of the gift that Nature’s hand bestows. A part of his excellent gift is the inspiration to poetry. The young shepherd was inspired with “poetic charms” as he wandered through the wild scenes
By Yarrow’s banks or groves of Endermay.
In his own experience
The nameless charms of high poetic thought,
were born of “spring’s green hours,” and the murmuring shore spoke to him “divine words,”[407] while in earlier days “each lay that falter’d from his tongue” had been “from Eden’s murmurs caught.”[408] In an ode to the “Genius of Westmoreland,” he says that she kindled the “sacred fire” in his heart, that she gave him “thoughts too high to be exprest.” Again he speaks of an hour in his youth when
The woodland genius came And touched me with his holy flame.[409]
Statements still more remarkable as foreshadowing later doctrines are found in such lines as,
Whatever charms the ear or eye, All beauty and all harmony, If sweet sensations they produce, I know they have their moral use.
I know that nature’s charms can move The springs that strike to virtue’s love.[410]
Or these lines,
Has fair philosophy thy love? Away! she lives in yonder grove. If the sweet muse thy pleasure gives, With her, in yonder grove, she lives. And if religion claims thy care, Religion fled from books is there. For first from nature’s works we drew Our knowledge and our virtue too.[411]
Langhorne’s perception of the power of Nature over man, and his passionate sense of personal indebtedness to Nature are the keynotes of his work. In a narrow way and with feeble speech he shows a mental and spiritual experience of the same type as that which Wordsworth records of his own youth. His motive in writing, “an unaffected wish to promote the love of Nature and the interests of humanity,” is likewise Wordsworthian.
In Christopher Smart’s one great poem, the “Song to David” (1763), the use of Nature is of so strange a character that it refuses classification under the customary categories. The chief thought of the poem in the parts where Nature is used has to do with the creative energy of God, the song of praise that is eternally his from all existence, and the exceeding sweetness, strength, beauty, and glory of the Spirit of God in man. These themes are not new with Smart in this poem. In his prize poems ten years before he had taken the attributes of God as his subject, and the general line of thought, and the method of proof by the rapid accumulation of illustrative images drawn from Nature are practically the same as in the “Song to David.” Here and there are instances of the same noble conceptions and striking phrases, as in this picture of a tree:
The oak His lordly head uprears, and branching arms Extends--behold in regal solitude And pastoral magnificence he stands So simple! and so great! The underwood Of meaner rank an awful distance keep.[412]
Or this description of the Leviathan that,
The terror and the glory of the main, His pastime takes with transport proud to see, The ocean’s vast dominions all his own.[413]
It is, however, only in the “Song” that the early themes are treated with sustained energy of thought and splendor of imagery. In this poem each thought is abundantly illustrated from Nature. The details are brought together from every clime and season. They are poured forth with impetuous ardor. The excited imagination of the poet does not hesitate and choose. The universe is laid under contribution. There is a prodigal heaping-up of the treasures of Nature, an almost barbaric splendor of images. Does the poet wish to say that all Nature praises God? The earth passes before him as in a vision. The great song of adoration swells upon his ear from every form of harmonious activity. Seasons change, almonds glow, tendrils climb, fruit trees blossom, birds build their nests, bell-flowers nod, the spotted ounce and her cubs play, harvests ripen, wild carnations blow, the pheasant shows his glossy neck, the squirrel hoards nuts, the map of Nature is crowded with scenes of beauty, the crocus “burnishes alive” upon the snow-clad earth, the bullfinch sings his flute note, the redbreast balances on the hazel spray, silver fish glide through rivers, cataracts fall, fruits are luscious, gums give out incense, all to “heap up the measure, load the scales” with praise to the Lord who is great and glad. In this rapid summary there is a pomp, an energy, an activity that is indescribable. A later stanza on strength is almost terrifying in its powerful imagery.
Strong is the lion--like the coal His eyeball--like a bastion’s mole His chest against the foes: Strong the gier-eagle on his sail, Strong against tide the enormous whale Emerges as he goes.
Except Blake’s “Tiger” I recall no poem marked by the same tenseness and abrupt energy.
Many of the details in Smart’s poems were drawn from his reading, especially from the Hebrew Scriptures. They could not have come from observation for they have little to do with the “old, oft catalogued repository of things in sky and wave and land.” The images are fresh, original, daring. They startle the mind out of passivity.
Another point to be noted is the peculiar combination of facts. Bears, sleek tigers, ponies, and kids, are the beasts assembled to illustrate God’s creative activity, and so in other combinations. Objects the least likely to suggest each other are brought together. In the same way facts from Nature and from human nature are strangely mingled. Among beauteous things are reckoned a fleet before a gale, a host in glittering armor, a wild garden, a moonlight night, and a virgin before her spouse.
Amidst the prettinesses, decencies, timidities, of the eighteenth-century poetry of Nature, this poem by Smart sounds out like a trumpet. The marshaled facts move forward like a cohort of soldiers with a splendid tread that shakes the earth. The whole effect is Hebraic, apocalyptic.
Mickle’s chief poems are “Syr Martyn” (1767) “Pollio” (1762) and some shorter pieces. In “Pollio” Mickle makes frequent references to his own love of Nature. The country he knew best was that about Roslin Castle where he was brought up, but he was not unfamiliar with other parts of southeast Scotland as is shown by his references to the Forth, the Annan, the Wauchope, the Ewes, to the dales of Tiviot, and to various country seats. His interest in Nature was varied in character. In “Almada Hill” (1781) and “May Day” there are frequent appreciative lines on mountains, as:
Where Snowden’s front ascends the skies,
The tower-like summits of the mountain shore.
There are briefer references in such phrases as, “the hills of Cheviot,” “the thyme-clad mountain,” “the mountains gray,” “Old Snowden,” “Snowden’s hoary side,” “the curving mountain’s craggy brow,” which serve at least to show that Mickle was not unconscious of the scenery about him. One or two lines indicate the effect of the sea on his mind. As he stood on Almada Hill and looked out over old Ocean,
By human eye untempted, unexplored, An awful solitude,
it was
the last dim wave, in boundless space Involved and lost[414]
that held his impatient imagination. Even so brief a passage serves to illustrate the awakened curiosity, the new sense of pleasure in the infinite and the unknown, that characterized the romantic impulse. Another modern note in Mickle is his interest in moonlight and stars. There are several picturesque descriptive lines, as,
When sudden, o’er the fir-crown’d hill The full orb’d moon arose.[415]
How bright, emerging o’er yon broom-clad height The silver empress of the night appears.[416]
While on the distant east Led by her starre, the horned moone looks o’er The bending forest, and with rays increast Ascends.[417]
The star of evening glimmers o’er the dale And leads the silent host of heaven along.[418]
In spite of the classical note in such a phrase as “silver empress” these lines show not only genuine pleasure in the loveliness of night, but also first-hand knowledge of its phenomena. Closeness of observation is further indicated in the lines on birds, as in the description of the “sootie black-bird,” that chants his shrill vespers from the topmost spray of some tall tree, or of the eagle that sails through the sky with “wide-spread wings unmov’d” till suddenly he “sheer descends” on the brow of Snowdon.
In his representation of flowers Mickle notes the “daisie-whitened plain,” and “the white and yellow flowers that love the dank,” but he was especially attracted by flowers growing among rocks or upon cliffs. One close observation is of the twinkling lines of gossamer that on summer mornings hang from spray to spray.
Mickle’s poems show a genuine love of Nature. He abounds in reminiscences of his happy youth
By the banks of the crystal-streamed Esk, Where the Wauchope her yellow wave joins.[419]
His chief use of Nature is in the passages where he gives these early associations, and in the many similitudes in his “Elegies.” He always sees Nature in a pathetic or joyous union with past experiences in his own life or in that of others.
Grainger’s chief poem, “The Sugar Cane,” appeared in 1764. The theme and outline are presented in the first four lines:
What soil the cane affects; what care demands; Beneath what signs to plant; what ills await; How the hot nectar best to crystallize; And Afric’s sable progeny to treat.
Grainger recognizes as his poetical masters, Maro, the “pastoral Dyer” (“The Fleece”), “Pomona’s bard” (“Cyder”), Smart (“The Hop Garden”), and Somerville (“The Chace”). “The Sugar Cane” is a purely didactic poem and is no real contribution to the new feeling toward Nature. The first part of the “Ode to Solitude,” a long ode beginning,
O Solitude, Romantic maid,
is another example of the sentimental view of Nature, with frequent and obvious imitations of Milton; but the last half of the poem declares that only the old and feeble should seek the solitude of the country, that shades are no medicine for a troubled mind, and, in general, that the proper business of mankind is man.
Chronologically Macpherson’s “Poems of Ossian” belong in the five years before the publication of Percy’s “Reliques” (1765), and they are a part of the same general stream of influence, the revival of folklore. These poems are epic in character, their aim being the celebration of the exploits of Celtic heroes. They are of importance in this study because the adventures of Fingal, Ossian, Oscar, and Gaul are throughout closely associated with natural scenery of a wild and romantic sort.[420] Mist-covered mountains, storm-swept skies, rough streams, desolate shores, dim moonlight nights, are the most frequent scenic details, and they are so wrought into the story that the human tragedy and the scene where it was enacted cannot be thought of apart. The three ways in which Nature is used in these poems, as dramatic background, in similitudes, and in apostrophes, will serve to illustrate both the prominence given to Nature and the close union between human emotions and the varying phenomena of the external world. A fine example of a bright description to usher in a sudden contrasting portent of disaster is in the opening lines of “Temora”:
The blue waves of Erin roll in light. The mountains are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Gray torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills, with aged oaks, surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is there.
The song that was “lovely, but sad, and left silence in Carric-Thura,” has an autumn picture as its fit setting:
Autumn is dark on the mountains; gray mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill and marks the slumbering Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind and strew the graves of the dead.[421]
The description of the desolation of Balclutha is the prelude to the song of mourning for the unhappy Moina.[422] The use of Nature in apostrophes is characteristic of the Ossian poems. Of these the most famous is the address to the sun.[422] There are frequent apostrophes to winds, streams, and tempests, to stars, and especially to the moon. Two good examples are the poet’s address to the evening star in “The Songs of Selma,” and to the moon in “Dar Thula.” Of these the second may be quoted as fairly typical:
Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant! Thou comest forth in loveliness. The stars attend thy blue course in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O Moon! they brighten their dark-brown sides. Who is like thee in heaven, light of the silent night? The stars are ashamed in thy presence.... But thou thyself shalt fail one night, and leave thy blue path in heaven. The stars will then lift their heads.... Thou art now clothed with thy brightness. Look from thy gates in the sky. Burst the cloud, O wind! that the daughter of night may look forth; that the shaggy mountains may brighten, and the ocean roll its white waves in light.
It will be observed that in almost every apostrophe there is beautiful external description together with an underlying analogy to the thought of the poem. In the passages quoted above, the triumphant brightness of the moon in her blue path, and the suggestion of the coming night when she shall fail in heaven, are but types of the beauty of Dar Thula and of the day when, though the winds of spring shall be abroad, though the flowers shall shake their heads on the green hills, and the woods shall wave their growing leaves, the white-bosomed maiden shall not again move in the steps of her loveliness.
Dr. Blair in his full study of the similitudes of Ossian admits that they are too “thick-sown,” and that they are drawn from a narrow range of objects. But he claims, on the other hand, that the similes have the exceptional vividness that comes from first-hand observation,[423] and that they show an imaginative perception of subtle analogies.[424] Dr. Blair’s recognition of beauty and congruity was so quickened by his partisanship of Ossian that his conclusions usually need to be scrutinized in the cold light of facts. The subtlety of the analogies certainly often escapes the ordinary reader, but no one can fail to observe the pathetic beauty of the little pictures into which the similitudes are often elaborated. Music, for instance, is compared to “the rising breeze, that whirls at first the thistle’s beard, then flies dark-shadowy over the grass.” Again a song is “like the voice of a summer breeze, when it lifts the head of flowers and curls the lakes and streams.” The heroes contended “like gales of spring, as they fly along the hill, and bend by turns the feebly-whistling grass.” The warriors are “bright as the sunshine before a storm; when the west wind collects the clouds, and Morven echoes over all her oaks.” In these and many similar comparisons we see how the beauty of the suggested natural picture led the poet into a use of details not necessary for his illustrations. The importance of the poetry of Ossian in the evolution of the poetry of Nature rests on its early date, its close interweaving of human emotions and natural scenes, and its abundant and appreciative use of wild, free Nature.
Percy’s “Reliques” appeared in 1765. The publication of these ballads was of great importance to the cause of the romantic revival in general. The ballads were, however, of somewhat less significance in their influence on the new feeling toward Nature. A ballad would never interrupt the story for a description, and there would, of course, never be any hint of a philosophy of Nature. But throughout the ballads there are casual touches of description showing a genuine love for some forms of Nature, especially the forest, green hills, and moors. “Upon the wide moors,” “on moors so broad,” “over the fields so brown,” “over the lea,” “over the downs,” are characteristic phrases. The castles are usually on a hill and command a wide view.[425] The love of the hills is indicated by such little pictures as
Robin sat on a gude grene hill, Keipand a flock of fie.[426]
or,
Lord Thomas and fair Annet Sate a’ day on a hill, When night was cum and sun was sett They had not talkt their fill.[427]
]But it is the forest that most often appears.
Until they came to the merry green wood, Where they had gladdest bee,[428]
gives the fresh, open-air setting of most of these tales of love and heroism;
Mery it was in the grene forest Amonge the leves grene;[429]
All in the merrye month of May, When greene buds they were swellin;[430]
And wee’ll away to the greene forest;[431]
Gil Morice sate in gude grene wode, He whistled and he sang;[432]
In summer time when leaves grow greene And blossoms bedecke the tree;[433]
To the greene forest so pleasant and faire;[434]
He myght have dwelt in grene foreste, Under the shadowes greene;[435]
The woodweele sang, and wold not cease Sitting upon the spraye, Soe lowde, he wakened Robin Hood In the greenwood where he lay;[436]
are typical forest pictures.[437] But the gude green wood is not always fresh and blooming, as we see from occasional lines such as
Now loud and shrill blew the westlin’ wind, Sair beat the heavy shower;[438]
About Yule quhen the wind blew cule;[439]
Oft have I ridden thro’ Stirling town In the wind both and the weit;[440]
No shimmering sun here ever shone; No halesome breeze here ever blew;[441]
Trees are not often mentioned individually except the oak and the willow, the latter always representing sorrow.
There is occasional use of Nature in simple comparisons, as, “White as evir the snaw lay on the dike,” “drye as a clot of claye,” “light of foot as stag that runs in forest wild,” his “een like gray gosehawk’s stair’d wyld.”
There are also some homely pictures of everyday country life, as in “Take Thy Old Cloak about Thee,” “Plain Truth and Blind Ignorance” (Somersetshire dialect), “The Ew-Bughts Marion,” and “The Auld Good Man.”
The use of Nature in the “Ballads,” slight and limited as it is, gives an impression of vivid reality. It is what Schiller would call the simple as opposed to the sentimental love of Nature, the first being characteristic of early races who _are_ Nature, and the last of the moderns who _seek_ Nature.[442] On eighteenth-century readers who, as a class, knew little about the external world outside their parks and gardens, the effect of the descriptive touches in the “Ballads” would be to lead them into lovely regions where Nature was as spontaneous and free as the knights and fair ladies themselves.
Michael Bruce imitated Milton’s “Lycidas” in an elegy called “Daphnis” and imitated Gray in some “Runic Odes,” which were lauded as “truly Runic and truly Grayan.” In these poems the use of Nature is slight and conventional. His “Lochleven” (1766) is more significant. In this poem he celebrates
The pastoral mountains, the poetic streams
of his native land. He finds all Nature full of joy.
The vales, the vocal hills, The woods, the waters, and the heart of man Send out a general song; ’tis beauty all To poet’s eye and music to his ear.
Clouds arrested in their swift course by lofty mountains, lakes that hold a mirror to the sky, songsters twittering o’er their young, waters glowing beneath western clouds, hoary-headed Grampius clad in snow, are counted among his pleasures. He prefers life in the country, for there
All in the sacred, sweet, sequestered vale Of solitude, the secret primrose-path Of rural life, he dwells.
He loved especially the Gairney, a stream that flows into Loch Leven, because, as a lad, he lay on its banks and composed poetry. He speaks with evident knowledge of other streams, the gulfy Po, “slow and silent among its waving reeds,” and the rapid Queech rushing impetuous over broken steeps. It is natural that Bruce should know, as he did, especially water birds. The “wild-shrieking gull,” “patient heron,” “dull bittern,” the “clamorous mew,” and the “slow-wing’d crane” moving heavily along the shore, were doubtless birds that he had often seen. Bruce’s pleasure in wide views is shown by this poem, “Lochleven,” for it is a description of the prospect spread out before him as he stands on “Mount Lomond.” Bruce’s “Elegy” was written when he felt himself dying of consumption. It represents his delight in all forms of Nature’s life and his deep melancholy at bidding farewell to the spring-time world.
By a process of selection we find in Bruce’s poems his real love for the outer world. This is not, however, the impression made by his poems as a whole. His knowledge of Nature was limited, and his expression was often rigid and formal. He died young, before he had really attained the mastery of his own thought, and his importance lies not so much in actual accomplishment as in scattered suggestions of his tendencies and possibilities.
Bruce’s most intimate friend was John Logan, who, in 1770, published an edition of Bruce’s poems and included some “wrote by other authors.” In 1781, when he published his own works, he laid claim to a number of the poems that had appeared in the edition of Bruce’s poems in 1770. Among these the most important was “The Cuckoo,”[443] a poem well worth the sharp controversy waged over it by the respective friends of the two authors. There is nothing else in this period that rings so fresh and clear as this little ode. One stanza may be quoted to illustrate its beauty, its simplicity, and naturalness. This stanza is also of peculiar interest because it so definitely foreshadows Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo.”
The schoolboy, wandering through the wood, To pull the primrose gay, Starts, the new voice of spring to hear, And imitates thy lay.
Logan’s other poems, though he has nothing equal to the cuckoo song in spontaneity and exquisite simplicity, are yet of real value. His “Braes of Yarrow” is an effective presentation of the ancient, sorrow-laden Yarrow _motif_. As is fitting in a ballad, the touches of description are of the briefest sort, but the forest, the bonny braes, and the sounding stream are felt through all the plaintive story. “Ossian’s Hymn to the Sun” is a poetical paraphrase of the famous apostrophe in “Balclutha.” It has some fine lines, but is inferior in strength to the original. The “Ode Written in Spring” is a laudation of a certain fair Maria in the true classical fashion, but the new note is struck in the first five stanzas descriptive of spring.
The loosen’d streamlet loves to stray And echo down the dale,
The hills uplift their summits green,
The cuckoo in the wood unseen,
At eve the primrose path along, The milkmaid shortens with a song, Her solitary way,
The sudden fields put on the flowers,
are lines showing fresh observation and easy, natural expression. Another passage characterizes autumn as “the Sabbath of the year.” Limited in compass as is Logan’s good work it is of value because marked by exceptional purity and sweetness.
Most of James Graeme’s poems were written before he was twenty. His tastes are thus referred to by his friend, Dr. Robert Anderson:
A passion for romantic fiction and fabulous history, appeared in him very early in life.... Of the Gothic, Celtic and Oriental mythology he was a warm admirer; and frequently attempted imitations of the wild and flowery fictions of the northern and eastern nations.... Like other votaries of the Muses, he was passionately fond of rural scenery, and delighted in walking alone in the fields.
His chief poems of Nature are some descriptive elegies. Occasionally there is a fairly good line, as
The torrents, whiten’d with descending rain,
or
The blue-gray mist that hovers o’er the hill,
showing at least a hint of first-hand observation. But on the whole the poems are a composite of phrases belonging to the typical poetry of sentimental melancholy. His characteristic attitude toward Nature is shown by his constant preference for chilly midnight when howlets scream and ravens croak, and when he, with pensive care, tunes the voice of woe and sheds “teary torrents” over grass-green graves. One poem, on “Curling,” is, however, quite different in tone, for it is a crudely realistic and technical description of the game and the peasants who engage in it. The tastes of Graeme and his attempts are of more significance than his actual work, which is of little value.
The bent of Goldsmith’s mind was toward the study of man in social relations. His use of Nature is accessory and limited. In “The Traveller” (1764) the real interest is in manners and customs.[444] When the pilgrim is in the Alps with a wide prospect before him, it is the thought of man’s grand heritage that impresses him. In the account of Switzerland there is only a vague general description of the country, but a full, sympathetic description of the peasant. So, too, in Italy, France, Holland, and even in England. In the few descriptions that do occur there are occasional lines indicative of first-hand observation, as in this picturesque couplet on the scenery in Holland:
The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale, The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail.
We also find effective combinations of geographical names that give a certain charm of remoteness and melody; and there is a sense of space and movement conveyed by the rapidly presented and wide landscapes.
In “The Deserted Village” (1770) the central thought is still man, and the purpose didactic, but there is effective though not abundant use of Nature. Even here, however, it is only Nature inseparably associated with man. Nine-tenths of the poem has to do directly with human nature. The other tenth merely gives charming pictures of the country close about a village. Scattered lines are of perfect workmanship, as that one descriptive of the straggling fence,
With blossomed furze unprofitably gay,
and
The breezy covert of the warbling grove.
In the picture of desolation the details are selected with delicacy and precision. Each touch helps the general impression. The value of such work becomes more apparent when put into contrast with the description of torrid climes. In Goldsmith and in Thomson what was seen at first hand had the grace and power of truth, but scenes in remote lands, known only through the distorting spectacles of books, were credited with an odd mixture of incongruous details. Except for one use of mountains in a simile there is no indication that Goldsmith knew any but tame scenery.
In general we may say that Goldsmith showed a direct, simple-hearted pleasure in the open-air world, that he was a sympathetic observer of the more obvious facts of Nature, and that he had a bright, easy way of recording those facts. The simplicity of his work is combined with a quick perception of artistic form. But he has hardly a touch of what Matthew Arnold calls “natural magic,” and he is in no sense a revealer. He was on the surface of things. Of the higher ministry of Nature to man’s spiritual needs he knew nothing.
In his prose works Goldsmith has several vigorous attacks on falseness and affectation in poetry. In 1759 he characterized Italian poetry at its lowest ebb, as “no longer an imitation of what we see, but of what a visionary might wish. The zephyrs breathe a most exquisite perfume; the trees wear eternal verdure; fauns, dryads, and hamadryads stand ready to fan the sultry shepherdess ... who is so simple and innocent as often to have no meaning.” This attack on the falseness and affectation of Italian poetry might be quoted verbatim by a modern critic of the popular eighteenth-century pastorals. Goldsmith also praised Gay’s poems saying that “he has hit upon the true spirit of pastoral poetry.” Goldsmith has other keen critical remarks that point in the direction of the new spirit but they do not bear directly on the study of Nature. He is important chiefly because of his interest in man as man, his close and sympathetic delineation of the poor and ignorant.
In 1766 James Beattie had written 150 lines of “The Minstrel.” The poem was then laid aside for the “Essay on Truth” and not taken up again till 1770. The first book was published anonymously in 1771. The second book appeared with the author’s name in 1774. The poem consists of 122 Spenserian stanzas. Its design is “to trace the progress of a poetical genius ... till that period when he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a minstrel,”[445] and its theme is really the effect of mountain scenery on a poetically sensitive mind. The child, Edwin, is brought up in a remote village among the Scotch hills, and his genius is developed through the varied influence of wild natural scenery until he becomes “itinerant poet and musician.” As a lad his chief pleasure was to follow
Where the maze of some bewilder’d stream To deep untrodden groves his footsteps led.
He loved to climb craggy cliffs
When all in mist the world below was lost. What dreadful pleasure! There to stand sublime Like shipwreck’d mariner on desert coast And view the enormous waste of vapour, toss’d In billows, lengthening to the horizon round, Now scoop’d in gulfs, with mountains now emboss’d.
And oft he traced the uplands, to survey, When o’er the sky advanced the kindling dawn, The crimson cloud, blue main and mountain gray.
He was
Fond of each gentle, and each dreadful scene. In darkness and in storm he found delight.
He listened
with pleasing dread, to the deep roar Of the wide-weltering waves.
When storms came up in black array
He hastened from the haunt of man, Along the trembling wilderness to stray.
He visited haunted streams by moonlight and let his imagination dwell on graves and ghosts. His soul was possessed by the “mystic transports” born of “melancholy and solitude.” He scanned all Nature with a “curious and romantic eye,” and his imagination was stirred by “old heroic ditties,” by
What’er of lore tradition could supply From gothic tale, or song, or fable old.
The second stage of Edwin’s education comes through his companionship with a wise hermit, who, like Wordsworth’s Solitary, had “sought for glory in the paths of guile,” but finally, dissatisfied with success and stung with remorse, had hidden himself in a deep retired abode in the mountains, there to commune with Nature. From a lofty eminence Edwin chanced to look down one day upon this savage dell, shut in by mountains and rocks piled on rocks, and he saw the “one cultivated spot” with its garden of roses and herbs, and he heard the voice of the hermit soliloquizing on the vanity of human life. In subsequent interviews the hermit discoursed learnedly on history, art, and sciences.
The intrinsic value of this poem is not great. It is important because of the conception which it embodies. Edwin finds in Nature adequate instruction and inspiration; the hermit, adequate consolation. His words are,
Hail, awful scenes, that calm the troubled breast, And woo the weary to profound repose! Can passion’s wildest uproar lay to rest, And whisper comfort to the man of woes?
Now the power of wild scenery over the plastic mind is exactly Wordsworth’s idea in his account of the Wanderer’s youth,[446] and the power of Nature to minister to a mind diseased is one of the leading thoughts in his account of the Solitary,[447] while the thought of tracing a child’s experiences with Nature until under her tutelage he becomes a poet is the fundamental idea of the “Prelude.”[448] It is certainly of more than merely curious interest thus to find in the rather vague, ineffective stanzas of the earlier poet general conceptions which afterward appear as the ruling ideas of the poet confessedly greatest in his treatment of Nature.
The character of Edwin was autobiographic and shows Beattie’s personal love of Nature. In a letter to the Dowager Lady Forbes, October, 1772, he wrote:
I find you are willing to suppose that, in Edwin, I have given only a picture of myself as I was in my younger days. I confess the supposition is not groundless. I have made him take pleasure in the scenes in which I took pleasure, and entertain sentiments similar to those of which, even in my early youth, I had repeated experience. The scenery of a mountainous country, the ocean, the sky, thoughtfulness and retirement, and sometimes melancholy objects and ideas, had charms in my eyes, even when I was a school boy; and at a time when I was so far from being able to express, that I did not understand my own feelings, or perceive the tendency of my own pursuits and amusements.
Beattie never lost this keen delight in Nature. When he was schoolmaster at Fordoun, at the foot of the Grampian Hills, his greatest pleasure was found in the neighboring mountains and wooded glens. His biographer also says that he would frequently “pass the whole night among the fields, gazing on the sky, and observing the various aspects it assumed till the return of day.” Beattie’s poems bear conclusive evidence of his love of Nature in all her forms. Mountains, and the sea, wild scenes of various sorts, storms, torrents, night, clouds, the sky, streams, meadows, groves, summer and winter, wide views, are regarded with genuine delight. But there are certain curious limitations. There are almost no specific flowers, birds, or trees mentioned in all this abundant study of the external world. This use of the general instead of the specific is one element of an effect too often perceived, an indefiniteness of outline, a vague blurring of edges, the result of which is not mysterious suggestiveness but simply dimness and confusion. There is also an unexpected feebleness of vocabulary and lack of direct observation. The old word “murmur,” for instance, is applied with wearisome insistence to springs, rills, water, the ocean, pines, woods, groves, and gales. So the interest in wild Nature, when analyzed, shows a rather monotonous and undiscriminating succession of cliffs and precipices. But it would be unfair to press these limitations too far. There are many true observations happily presented, as in the following lines which are selected as illustrative:
While waters, woods, and winds in concert join.
The wild brook babbling down the mountain side.
Torrents Heard from afar amid the lonely night.
And now the storm of summer rain is over And cool and fresh and fragrant is the sky.
When by the winds of autumn driven The scatter’d clouds fly ’cross the Heaven. Oft have we from some mountain’s head Beheld the alternate light and shade Sweep along the vale.
The scared owl on pinions gray Breaks from the rustling boughs And down the lone vale sails away To more profound repose.
He finds pleasure in old oak trees that
from the stormy promontory tower And toss their giant arms amid the skies.
In winter he watches
The cloud stupendous, from the Atlantic wave High towering, sail along the horizon blue.
Lines such as these show knowledge both fresh and close, and the expression is marked by picturesque effectiveness.
But Beattie’s real contribution to the study of Nature lies, as has been indicated, in his own personal enthusiasm, and his steadfast belief in the effect of Nature on man. In one stanza he even set forth the doctrine, held to be sufficiently startling forty years later in Wordsworth’s day, that country rustics from their familiarity with Nature, gain a nicer sense of moral purity than is known among the poor of a city.[449] Upon all men he urged the study of Nature as a moral duty.
These charms shall work thy soul’s eternal health, And love, and gentleness, and joy impart.[450]
The message of Nature is one not to be ignored.
O how canst thou renounce the boundless store Of charms which Nature to her votary yields! The warbling woodland, the resounding shore, The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields; All that the genial ray of morning gilds, And all that echoes to the song of even, All that the mountain’s sheltering bosom shields, And all the dread magnificence of Heaven, O how canst thou renounce and hope to be forgiven![451]
Though less popular than the “Essay on Truth,” Beattie’s “Minstrel” met with almost immediate favor. Lyttleton said to Mrs. Montagu who sent him the first book in 1771:
I read your “Minstrel” last night, with as much rapture as poetry, in her noblest, sweetest charms, ever raised in my soul. It seemed to me that my once most beloved minstrel, Thomson, was come down from heaven, refined by the converse of purer spirits than those he lived with here, to let me hear him sing again the beauties of virtue.[452]
And Cowper wrote in 1784: “Though I cannot afford to deal largely in so expensive a commodity as books, I must afford to purchase at least the poetical works of Beattie.”[453] Mr. Dyce says that the success of “The Minstrel” (Book First) “was complete. The voice of every critic was loud in its praise; and before the second book appeared, four editions of the first had been dispersed throughout the kingdom.”[454]
“The Minstrel” is of importance in the historical development of the poetry of Nature because of the ideas it emphasizes, and because its immediate popularity is an indication of the change in taste since the beginning of the century.
Most of John Scott’s poems were on rural subjects,[455] and he is of especial interest because of his abundant and close observation of natural facts. Mr. Hoole says of him, “He was certainly no servile copyist of the thoughts of others; for living in the country, and being a close and accurate observer, he painted what he saw;” and again, “He cultivated the knowledge of natural history and botany, which enabled him to preserve the truth of Nature with many discriminating touches, perhaps not excelled by any descriptive poet since the days of Thomson.” It was Scott’s avowed purpose to enrich poetry by the use of many natural facts not before observed. In the introduction to the “Amoebaean Eclogues” he said, “Much of the rural imagery which our country affords, has already been introduced in poetry, but many obvious and pleasing appearances seem to have totally escaped notice. To describe these is the business of the following Eclogues.” After this explicit announcement, two gentle youths, in responsive verse, call attention to over two hundred rapidly stated natural facts. A fact to a line is about the average, as in these lines:
These pollard oaks their tawny leaves retain, These hardy hornbeams yet unstripped remain; The wint’ry groves all else admit the view Through naked stems of many a varied hue.
Old oaken stubs tough saplings there adorn.[456]
Straight shoots of ash with bark of glossy gray, Red cornel twigs, and maple’s russet spray.
There scabious blue, and purple knapweed rise, And weld and yarrow show their various dyes.
In shady lanes red foxglove bells appear And golden spikes the downy mullens rear.
The second of these “Eclogues” has to do with the care of farms and is as minute as Cowper’s treatise on the cucumber. There is nowhere in these poems any poetical fusion of facts. They read rather like the notebooks of a professional observer. Yet it is certainly significant to find at this date so persistent and systematic a search for natural facts, and that not in the service of science but of poetry. In “Amwell” Scott calls on the Muse of Thomson, Dyer, and Shenstone for his inspiration. The poem is a description of the prospect from a certain “airy height” near Amwell. A single illustration will show the minute observation and catalogue style in this commemoration of “lonely sylvan scenes.”
How picturesque The slender group of airy elm, the clump Of pollard oak, or ash, with ivy brown Entwin’d; the walnut’s gloomy breadth of boughs, The orchard’s ancient fence of rugged pales, The haystack’s dusty cone, the moss-grown shed, The clay-built barn; the elder-shaded cot. Whose whitewashed gable prominent through green Of waving branches shows; ... ... the wall with mantling vines O’erspread, the porch with climbing woodbine wreath’d. And under sheltering eaves the sunny bench Where brown hives range, whose busy tenants fill With drowsy hum the little garden gay, Whence blooming beans, and spicy herbs, and flowers, Exhale around a rich perfume! Here rests The empty wain; there idle lies the plough.
There is a pleasant homely grace in these lines about the cottage, worth more than all the historical episodes “introduced to secure interest.” In the “Elegies” and “Odes” there is no use of Nature different from that observed in the other poems, unless, indeed, mention should be made of Scott’s belief that Nature gives her fairest smiles to those “who know a Saviour’s love.” One further characteristic is to be found in a large number of the poems, and that is enjoyment of a wide view. He describes views as seen from “Musla’s cornclad heights,” from “Grove Hill,” the cliff at Bath, from “Chadwell’s cliffs,” from “Widbury’s prospect-yielding hill,” from “Upton’s elm-divided plains,” from “Clifton’s rock,” from Amwell, and other spots. The poems read as if he had spent many days climbing hills and prospecting for views.
Richard Cumberland wrote in 1776 several “Odes,” something in the style of Gray’s “Bard,” in honor of the artist Romney. In the “Dedication to Romney” he spoke with enthusiasm of the Lake Region.
In truth a more pleasing tour than these lakes hold out to men of leisure and curiosity cannot be devised. We penetrate the Glaziers, traverse the Rhone and the Rhine, whilst our domestic lakes of Ulls-water, Keswick, and Windermere, exhibit scenes in so sublime a stile, with such beautiful colourings of rock, wood, and water, backed with so tremendous a disposition of mountains, that if they do not fairly take the lead of all the views of Europe, yet they are indisputably such as no English traveller should leave behind him.
One of the poems, the “Ode to the Sun,” has Helvellyn, Skiddaw, the Derwent, Lodore, “Keswick’s sweet fantastic vale,” “stately Windermere,” “Savage Wyburn,” and “delicious Grasmere’s calm retreat” as its important scenic elements. He considers
The prim canal, the level green, The close-clipt hedge, that bounds the flourish’d scene
as but “the spruce impertinence of art.” From them comes no rapture such as that excited by the “gigantic shapes” of mountains. The Thames is but a tame stream compared with “old majestic Derwent” forcing his independent course. In contrast to the grandeur and splendor of Nature man seems but “weak, contemptible, and vain, the tenant of a day.” Imperial Ulls-water is not only declared to be superior in charm to Loch Lomond or Killarney, but it can maintain its own even against “ought that learned Poussin drew” or anything painted by “dashing Rosa.” Eighteenth-century praise of scenery could go no farther.
William Blake’s “Poetical Sketches,” published in 1783, were written between 1769 and 1777.[457] The “Songs of Innocence” appeared in 1788–9; “Book of Thel,” 1789; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790; and “Songs of Experience” in 1794. In the first volume Nature was the leading subject; in the next human interests were in the ascendent, and Nature was used only in fresh, ballad-like touches. In the later work Nature is slightly used and for the most part in the form of mystical symbolism.
It was Blake’s theory that man is “imprisoned in his five senses,” and he counted it his mission to reveal to closed eyes the spiritual as the only real fact of existence. In his early work this theory, as yet unexaggerated in application, led to a treatment of Nature, not untrue to facts, but characterized especially by qualities of simplicity and vision such as are not found again before Wordsworth. In these years of his youth Blake was essentially the poet of childhood and spring in all their sweet, potent, indefinable charm.
And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear And I wrote my happy songs, Every child may joy to hear,[458]
gives the keynote to these songs of delight. The joy of Nature is everywhere insisted on. The sun makes the sky happy; the vales rejoice; spring cannot hide its joy when buds and blossoms come; the happy blossoms look on merry birds; groves are happy and green woods rejoice; dimpling streams, the air, green hills, meadows, and birds laugh with delight. Here is one exquisite example:
The moon like a flower In heaven’s high bower, With silent delight, Sits and smiles on the night.[459]
He contrasts the clamor and destruction of city streets with the true joy in Nature. In the silent woods, delights blossom around, numberless beauties blow. The green grass springs in joy, and the nimble air kisses the leaves. The brook stretches its arms along the silent meadow, its silver inhabitants sport and play. The youthful sun joys like a hunter roused to the chase.[460] In “Fragments” and “Couplets,” excerpts from his MS book, occurs this fine, though casual statement of the opposition between town and country:
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; These are not done by jostling in the street.
Blake cared much for sleep as the time when man was most free from the tyranny of the senses. Many of his characters are represented as asleep, and the conception is transferred to many lovely scenes in Nature. He pictures summer as sleeping beneath oaks; flowers shut their eyes in sleep; the west wind sleeps on the lake; and dawn sleeps in heaven. With this is associated an evident pleasure in the silence of Nature, apparently the pathetic complement of its joys. There is a silent sleep over the deep of heaven; the evening star speaks silence to the lake. At night the moon is silent, and the earth, and the sea.
Occasional passages show the character of Blake’s own love of Nature, as,
I love to rise on a summer morn, I love the laughing vale, I love the echoing hill.
His feeling toward flowers was as intimate, as tenderly protecting, as was that of Burns toward small animals. Sun and stars, winds, clouds, dew, and angels are represented as caring for the happy blossoms.
All of Blake’s poetry of Nature is as freshly beautiful as the dewy mornings, the spring-time green, the shining skies, as clear and transparent as the limpid, dimpling streams he loved. There are also frequent passages that besides their metrical flow and exquisite charm of external suggestion seem to reveal the essential spirit of the object described. One of the loveliest examples is the word of the Lily of the Valley.
I am a watry weed, And I am very small and love to dwell in lowly vales: So weak the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head. Yet I am visited from heaven; and He that smiles on all Walks in the valley, and each morn over me spreads his hand. Saying, Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lilly flower, Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks; For thou shalt be clothed in light and fed with morning manna.[461]
For fine contrasts, each poem perfect of its kind, see “The Lamb” and “The Tiger.” The modest simplicity of the one is as adequately portrayed as the dread magnificence of the other. There is no description. There is interpretation of the most penetrating sort.
He has also frequent similes worked out with picturesque detail, as in this one from “The Couch of Death”:
He was like a cloud tossed by the winds, till the sun shines, and the drops of rain glisten, the yellow harvest breathes, and the thankful eyes of villagers are turned up in smiles; the traveller, that hath taken shelter under an oak, eyes the distant country with joy.
One secret of the effectiveness of Blake’s best work is his recognition of the unity of all existence. The prefatory stanza to “Auguries of Innocence,”
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour,
is a brief poetic statement of the creed afterward elaborated in Wordsworth’s “Primrose on the Rock” and Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” The thought back of the lines is the one in Wordsworth’s mind when he looked on “the meanest flower that blows.” It is this underlying consciousness of essential spiritual unity in all existence that gives to the work of both Blake and Wordsworth its subtle power.
There could hardly be two more dissimilar ways of approaching Nature than those of John Scott and William Blake. They stand at opposite poles, the one with no sense of unity, no power of poetic fusion or interpretation, but with a wide, accurate, and often picturesque assemblage of natural facts; the other with a prevailing tone of unreality and mysticism, a fine scorn of the actual, but with a swift recognition of the spirit of Nature, and an abiding sense of cosmic unity. Yet each represents a characteristic phase of the new feeling for Nature as seen in Wordsworth. On the one hand, the practiced eye and the inevitable ear; on the other, the vision and the faculty divine.
In its significance as a prophecy of Wordsworth and Shelley, the early poetry of William Blake is of especial importance.
Crabbe’s poetry falls into two periods, the first one closing with “The Newspaper” in 1785, and the second beginning with “The Parish Register” after an interval of twenty-two years. In the first of these periods we find but slight use of external Nature. The occasional similitudes are of a formal conventional type. The two longest descriptive passages are of a dismal winter scene,[462] and of some sterile summer fields that mock man’s need with profitless blooms.[463] There is no expression of pleasure in Nature. It is her pitiless, anti-human aspects that Crabbe sees. The charm of Nature independent of utility seems to have no meaning for him. He consciously repudiates
Clear skies, clear streams, soft banks, and sober bowers, Deer, whimpering brooks, and wind-perfuming flowers,
as unworthy poetic material.[464] Rough or barren Nature as the background or occasion of man’s misery is the thought of these early poems.
Crabbe’s second period does not properly belong in a study of development which has “The Lyrical Ballads” as its _terminus ad quem_, but it may be briefly spoken of here because of the interesting contrast it offers to the first period. A suggestive study might be made of the descriptive element in “The Village” (1783) as compared with that of “The Borough” (1810). The scene of each is a seaside village on the Suffolk coast, but we note many changes in the presentation. In the first place, in “The Borough” Nature plays a much more important part than in “The Village.” There is a leisurely elaborateness of description as if the poet enjoyed the work for its own sake. There is, to be sure, insistence on the ugly realistic details of the scenes about a country town, but there is in addition a recognition that even along this rocky coast and in these barren fields where Nature defies man’s industry there may be found her gift of beauty. The “greedy ocean” of “The Village” is now “a glorious page of nature’s book” on which the poorest may gaze with delight. The firm, fair sands on quiet summer evenings, the lovely “limpid blue and evanescent green” as shadows run over the waves on a fresh day, serene winter-views where strange effects of fog add mystery to the scene, the majesty of a storm at sea--all these are now reckoned a part of the pleasures of the poor in a seaside village. The sterile fields, too, have rare blossoms and curious grasses. There are pleasant walks with every scene rich in beauty. The evening twilight is sweet with jasmine odors.[465] “The Borough” is as realistic as “The Village,” but it has a broader outlook and depicts the attractive as well as the forbidding aspects of the Suffolk coast near Aldborough. In later poems the scope becomes still wider. Besides the frequent strong and truthful ocean pictures there are some beautiful descriptions of autumn days, moonlight nights, and soft, rich inland scenes. It is especially noteworthy that though there are seldom any gay or bright aspects of Nature presented, yet Nature is no longer represented as a force inimical to man. On the contrary, there is something in even her most useless forms that gives to man a strangely profound pleasure. The simple music of a cascade has in it a soothing power that words will not express. In the clear, silent night there is a quiet joy that lessens the sting of mortal pain. These positive expressions of pleasure in Nature are not numerous, but they are important as marking a distinct change of tone. They are the more significant because they occur chiefly in the poems after 1819.
Yet it must not pass unnoticed that what Crabbe wrote in these late poems, he had perceived and felt in his youth. In his description of Richard he gives an account of his own boyhood. Of the ocean he says,
I loved to walk where none had walked before About the rock that ran along the shore.
* * * * *
Here had I favorite stations, where I stood And heard the murmurs of the ocean flood, With not a sound beside, except when flew Aloft the lapwing, or the gray curlew.
* * * * *
Pleasant it was to view the sea-gulls strive Against the storm, or in the ocean dive With eager scream, or when they dropping gave Their closing wings to sail upon the wave.
* * * * *
Nor pleased it less around me to behold Far up the beach the yesty sea-foam rolled; Or from the shore upborne, to see on high Its frothy flakes in wild confusion fly: While the salt spray that clashing billows form Gave to the taste a feeling of the storm.[466]
He recalls how he explored every creek and bay, how he took long walks over the hilly heath and mossy moors. Most of the scenery in “The Borough” as well as that in “The Village” is a memory picture of the country he knew so well in boyhood. It seems strange that this genuine love and accurate knowledge of Nature should not have found fuller expression in his early poetry. The explanation is perhaps twofold. His interest was primarily in man. He said that the finest scenes in Nature were less attractive to him than faces on a crowded street. He meant to be the portrait painter of poor people as he had seen them in a seaside village. His bitter pictures of country vice and ignorance and folly had in them no touch of patronage or contempt. He simply gave a hard, truthful representation of sordid life, and Nature had no meaning for him except as it was brought into connection with that life. When in after years his own lot was a happier one, and when a wider experience had brought him into contact with thrifty country folk, the bitterness of his early thought of man was greatly modified. With new views of man came an openness of mind to the gentler aspects of Nature. The real love of his boyhood, no longer crushed down by an over-mastering sense of human misery, was allowed free play. Furthermore, his later work was doubtless influenced by the new spirit of poetry about him. His son says that while at first but a cool admirer of the Lake poets, he came soon to love them and took no books oftener in his hands. All of Crabbe’s work in which there is much use of Nature comes more than ten years after the “Lyrical Ballads,” hence his growingly full use of Nature might easily be due in part to the influence of the new school of poetry. His free life, the different class of peasants he saw, the new poetry he was reading, would all have their effect in turning his attention to Nature. But the Nature he chose to write about was that which he had known and loved as a boy.
William Cowper as a poet of Nature, is marked first by the narrowness of the limits within which he writes. Mountains[467] are merely mentioned. Night is nowhere described. Moonlight plays no part in his poetry.[468] The stars are occasionally spoken of, but only in a conventional manner as “shining hosts,” “fair ministers of light,” or “beamy fires.” Of wild scenery there is none. The nearest approach to it is in two brief descriptions of rocky bluffs on the seashore.[469] His references to the ocean are brief and not of much importance; nor are there any storms except in a few lines about “a driving, dashing rain” with thunder and lightning used as an “apt similitude.”[470] The one winter storm is merely a gentle fall of snow that comes after the evening curtains are tight drawn.[471] The similitudes, though often carefully elaborated, show little if any new use of Nature, and they are drawn from a small number of natural facts.[472]
The explanation of this narrowness of limit is twofold. Cowper described only what he had seen,[473] and he had seen no country but his own, and only a very small and comparatively uninteresting portion of that. The Downs about Bath, where he seems to have been for a short time when he was about eighteen, was the nearest approach to wild scenery that he had ever known. During the seventeen years before the writing of “The Task” (1785) he had seldom left Olney, and never for a fortnight together.[474] His knowledge was further limited by his continued ill-health. He was ignorant of certain phases of the out-door world simply because his physical infirmities kept him in the house.
This explanation of the narrow range of the Nature in Cowper’s poetry is not entirely satisfactory, for when we come to his letters we find suggestions of a wider experience and sympathy than the poems would indicate. In a letter to Joseph Hill he wrote:
I was always an admirer of thunderstorms, even before I knew whose voice I heard in them; but especially an admirer of thunder rolling over the great waters. There is something singularly majestic in the sound of it at sea, where the eye and the ear have uninterrupted opportunity of observation, and the concavity above, being made spacious, reflects it with more advantage.... We have indeed been regaled with some of those bursts of ethereal music.... But when the thunder preaches, an horizon bounded by the ocean is the only sounding board.
To the Rev. William Unwin, September 26, 1781, he wrote:
I think, with you, that the most magnificent object under heaven is the great deep; and can not but feel an unpolite species of astonishment when I consider the multitudes that view it without emotion, and even without reflection. In all its various forms it is an object of all others the most suited to affect us with lasting impressions of the awful power that created and controls it. I am the less inclined to think this negligence excusable, because, at a time of life when I gave as little attention to religious subjects as any man, I yet remember that the waves would preach to me, and that in the midst of dissipation I had an ear to hear them. One of Shakespeare’s characters says, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” The same effect that harmony seems to have had upon him I have experienced from the sight and sound of the ocean, which have often composed my thoughts into a melancholy not unpleasing nor without its use.
He had also, during these years at Olney, made many an imaginary evening journey to remote lands by means of books of travel, of which he was especially fond. But when he came to write poems, only what he had known at first hand and with long familiarity occurred to him. Experiences merely casual, or remote in time, and facts gained from books slipped away. He remembered only what he habitually saw. The scenes about Olney he knew, literally, by heart, and of these he wrote.
A characteristic excellence of Cowper’s treatment of Nature is that, within his narrow circuit, his knowledge is of unusual fulness and accuracy. The charm of truthful description is everywhere apparent. In pictures of homely country occupations, such as feeding the hens,[475] foddering the cattle,[476] cutting wood,[477] plowing,[478] threshing,[479] there are no false touches, no hasty work. All is the result of first-hand, leisurely, sympathetic observation. His description of the garden is from memory, but it almost seems as if he were walking from flower to flower and taking notes, so minute is the characterization, so exact each epithet in the representation of the various colors, forms, odors, and ways of growth of the flowers in this garden that the poet sees under the snows of winter.[480]
The same love of precise detail is illustrated in his descriptions of trees. In noting their color he does not, like Thomson, enjoy general, broadly inclusive words, but he gives the exact shade and tells to what tree it belongs. When he takes a walk he sees that the trunks of the ash, the lime, and the beech shine distinctly under their shadowy foliage. The willow is a “wannish gray.” The poplar is likewise gray, but there is a touch of silver in the lining of the leaves. The elm is deeper green than the ash, and the oak of a deeper green still. The maple, the beech, and the lime have glossy leaves that shine in the sun. The sycamore changes from green to tawny, and then to scarlet, according to the season.[481]
This highly differentiated knowledge is evident also in various passages on the sounds of Nature. In a letter to Newton he wrote: “The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception; ... and as to insects ... in whatever key they sing, from the gnat’s fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all.”
Equally specific is his record of the sounds from winds and waters, as in these lines:
Rills that slip Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of their silent course.[482]
Or these about forest sounds:
Mighty winds That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood Of ancient growth, make music not unlike The dash of ocean on his winding shore.[483]
In wider descriptions, as of extended views, there is absolutely no blurring of edges. The picture is as clear, distinct, and exact as a photograph. There is no inartistic mixing of foreground and background. A good example is the view described in the first book of “The Task.”[484] The eye travels over the landscape with its river shining like molten glass; on its banks droop the elms, on either side are level plains sprinkled with cattle, beyond is the sloping land covered with hedgerows, groves, heaths, with here and there a square tower or tall spire, and in the distance smoking towns; and at last the scene is lost in the clouds on the horizon.
Many little pictures, complete in a few lines, serve even better to illustrate the exquisite truth of Cowper’s work. Note this description of the shifting lights in a forest pathway:
While beneath The chequered earth seems restless as a flood Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the light Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance, Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick, And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves Play wanton, every moment, every spot.[485]
Or this of the squirrel just come from winter quarters in some lonely elm:
Flippant, pert, and full of play: He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird, Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush, And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm And anger insignificantly fierce.[486]
Equally felicitous are the descriptions of tall grass fledged with icy feathers on a frosty morning,[487] or of the redbreast in a sheltered woodland path in winter.[488] These pictures and other similar ones immediately take a permanent place in one’s mental picture gallery. It would be difficult indeed for a painting to make the light dance as it does in that forest path. The squirrel absolutely tingles with life. The right word comes easily and the lines show exquisite deftness of literary touch. It is rare in any poetry to find more excellent examples of pure description than these and other passages in “The Task.” Cowper had the mind that watches and receives. He looked about him and wrote down in simple, sincere words the loveliness he found. He took notes, but they were of the right sort, mental and unconscious, the inevitable imprint on a sensitive mind of scenes that had ministered to his deepest need.
The ministry of Nature to human needs is a cardinal principle in Cowper’s poetry. Nor was this conception merely theoretic. It was rather a transcript from his own experience. From childhood he had loved Nature,[489] and poems about Nature,[490] and he had always planned to live in the country.[491] After years of disappointment and terrifying fears, comparative peace came to him amid quiet country scenes. The instincts of his early days revived. Nature offered him a paradise of rich delights. She enchanted him. She gave him heart-consoling joys. She sweetened his bitter life, alluring him with smiles from gloom to happiness. The glory of each new morning was a lesson in hope. He found in Nature the nurse of wisdom, a power that could compose his passions and exalt his mind. He felt that in the country God spoke directly to his heart.[492]
The obverse of this genuine love of the country is an equally genuine detestation of the town and town standards. The crowds that swarm to city streets are the subjects of repeated invectives, and there is even more emphatic scorn of sham lovers of Nature, as cockneys in suburban villas; girls who but for the show and dress-parade of the country would hurry back to the city; men who love hunting and fishing, and call it a love of Nature; sentimentalists, who exclaim over Thomson’s poetry, but prefer to read it in the city.[493] His own relationship with Nature was too intimate and too sacred to admit of indifference or profanation on the part of others.
Cowper’s literary use of Nature was largely determined by his purpose in writing. His poetical thesis received its dogmatic summing-up in the famous dictum,
God made the country and man made the town,[494]
and to the establishment of this thesis nearly all his use of Nature is made more or less directly subservient.
This is clearly seen in his use of summaries. He has a habit of analyzing Nature into separate facts and then classifying these facts under topics. For instance, to make a list of his sounds one hardly needs to search through the poems. They will be found already grouped together. So, too, the garden flowers, the greenhouse flowers, the colors of trees, country occupations, and country pleasures, are arranged under heads instead of being scattered through various descriptions. Then there are many summaries of miscellaneous facts. Now the literary purpose of nearly every assemblage of details is the establishment or illustration of some point connected with the general conception of the superior attractions of the country. The catalogues of facts have a definite argumentative value, and the artistic selection of these facts out of the mass known is determined by the especial point under consideration. In “Retirement” there is a rapid enumeration of many phases of Nature in various seasons, the purpose being to show that all forms of Nature are pleasing to a poet’s mind. The following passage is a good example of a summary the purpose of which is to present a concrete, picturesque, amplified statement of the creed that Nature gives a wisdom higher than can come from books:
But trees, and rivulets, whose rapid course Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer, And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs, And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root, Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth, Not shy, as in the world, and to be won By slow solicitation, seize at once The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.[495]
Frequent summaries are used to show that in the country God gives especial revelations of his power. The long flower catalogue is to show that the beauty of the flushing spring but speaks to man of the in-dwelling of God.[496] The ceaseless activity of Nature is attested by another summary.[497] Still further summaries illustrate the power of Nature over the man wearied with cares of state.[498] The beautiful summary of rural sounds is to show the exhilarating effect of Nature on the languid mind and heart.[499] It is this underlying purpose that gives unity to passages which would otherwise be hardly more than catalogues.
Another characteristic way in which Cowper presents Nature is in descriptive passages used as a background for his own meditative figure. The beautiful description of the sheltered path where he walked in winter[500] would lose much of its meaning if we were not throughout conscious of the poet’s presence and his delighted response to all the influences about him. Nearly all the passages that might otherwise be called pure description are given warmth and tone by the fact that we go with the poet, and, as it were, hear him talk about the scene as one he has long known and loved, until it takes an added interest from his personality, or we seem to see him in semi-identification with the scenes. It is the apparent equality, the comradeship, between the hare, the squirrel, and the poet in the solitary winter retreat that adds to the beauty of the spot the needed human touch. Nature is thus suffused with human experience and takes on a new interest. But it usually happens that these descriptions become, further, either the appropriate setting for a certain train of reflections on the part of the poet, or they directly suggest these suggestions. In the winter retreat just spoken of the fearless, innocent animal life becomes the occasion of a long disquisition on the lesson of benevolence taught by Nature to man. In the sheltered walk the poet finds his mind soothed and prepared for a Wordsworthian contemplation on Nature as the teacher of the wise, so that ultimately many of Cowper’s descriptions, as well as his summaries, become contributory to his main purpose.
Cowper’s knowledge of natural facts was not more remarkable than John Scott’s. His range was much narrower than Thomson’s. Other men had loved Nature with passionate intensity. To other minds Nature had suggested deep thoughts of God and man. Cowper came when many elements of the new attitude toward Nature had been clearly voiced. What marks him out as holding a unique position is not only that he gave body and emphasis to the new thought, but especially that he became its propagandist. He analyzed the effect of Nature on man, he translated his personal experiences into a theory which he set himself to interpret and promulgate. He wrote with the zeal of a convert. Joy such as had come to him late in life was man’s natural heritage. Men must be called back from the perverted and ruinous life of towns to the simplicity of Nature. His theme is stated abstractly, repeated in concrete form, illustrated and amplified with the patience and ardor of absolute conviction. He was the preacher of the new religion of Nature.
Robert Burns was deeply sensitive to the charms of Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop he said:
I have some favorite flowers in Spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birk and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over, with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a Summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the Enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry.[501]
Again he says:
I have various sources of pleasure which are in a manner peculiar to myself.... Such is the peculiar pleasure I take in the season of Winter more than in the rest of the year.... There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more--I don’t know if I should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day, and hear a stormy wind howling among the trees and raving o’er the plain. It is my best season for devotion; my mind is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to _Him_ who ... walks on the wings of the wind.[502]
Note also what Mr. Walker, his companion on the border tour, says of him:
I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns. When we reached a rustic hut on the river Tilt, where it is overhung by a woody precipice, from which there is a noble waterfall, he threw himself on the heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous enthusiasm of imagination.... It was with much difficulty that I prevailed upon him to leave the spot.[503]
This susceptibility to Nature was one of the signs by which “Coila” knew that Burns would be the poet of Scotland. He represents her as saying to him:
I saw thee seek the sounding shore, Delighted with the dashing roar; Or when the North his fleecy store Drove thro’ the sky I saw grim Nature’s visage hoar Struck thy young eye.
Or when the deep green-mantl’d earth Warm cherish’d ev’ry flow’ret’s birth And joy and music pouring forth In ev’ry grove, I saw thee eye the gen’ral mirth With boundless love.[504]
In his “Commonplace Book,” Burns records his eager desire to write verse that shall make “the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands & sequestered scenes on Aire, and the healthy, mountainous source, & winding sweep of Doon emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed, &c.” And his love of Nature was limited in scope to just these scenes of which he speaks. He had no interest in mountains or the sea. Mr. Douglas calls attention to the fact that, “living in full face of the Arran hills he never names them.”[505] He was as narrow in his limits and as vividly local in the Nature he chose to represent as was Cowper, but what he loved he loved with intensity. In the beautiful and picturesque scenery about Ayr he found poetic inspiration. To William Simson he said,
The muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himself he learn’d to wander, Adown some trottin burn’s meander, An’ no think lang;
and in “The Brigs of Ayr” he says the simple bard may learn his tuneful trade from every bough.
Burns’ knowledge of the Nature about him was abundant and exact, and he was keenly critical of any note of falsity in the poems of others. He objected to the “Banks of the Dee” because of the line,
And sweetly the _nightingale_ sang from the _tree_.
“In the first place,” he said, “the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from a tree; and in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or heard on the banks of the Dee, nor the banks of any other river in Scotland. Exotic, rural imagery is always comparatively flat.”[506]
Again he said of another song, “It is a fine song, but for consistency’s sake, alter the name ‘Adonis.’ Was there ever such banns published, as a purpose of marriage between _Adonis_ and _Mary_? These Greek and Roman pastoral appellations have a flat, insipid effect in a Scot song.”[507] He gives especial praise to Rev. Dr. Cririe, because “like Thomson,” the poet had “looked into Nature for himself,” and had nowhere been content with a “copied description.”[508]
When Burns wrote a descriptive poem of set purpose he was comparatively commonplace and uninteresting as in “The Fall of Foyers” or “Admiring Nature.” His best descriptions come in, by chance as it were, in the midst of some vivid human interests. One of the most beautiful is a stanza in “Halloween”:
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 ta the nightly rays, Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle; Whyles cookit underneath the braes, Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night.
Work so perfect as this is rare in any age. The beauty of the poem is simply the beauty of the stream itself.
Burns’ chief use of Nature, however, is in connection with man. External Nature is illustration, background, frame, for human emotions. “The Lass of Cressnock Banks” was written at twenty-two and is the first one of his poems in which there is any distinct use of Nature. It is merely an assemblage of twelve formally drawn-out similes to represent the beauty of the lassie. Some of these similes are conventional and unmeaning, as when her hair is likened to curling mist on a mountain side,[509] her forehead to a rainbow, her lips to ripe cherries, and her teeth to a flock of sheep. In later poems the similitudes are simpler and sweeter, but they are drawn from a small number of facts and those of the more obvious sort, as the “simmer morn,” “the flower in May,” “the opening rose.” A much more effective use of Nature is as dramatic background either by congruity or contrast. As fine examples of the use of Nature to give the keynote of the human emotion it accompanies we have the opening lines of the “Elegy,” “Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,” “Raving Winds around Her Blowing,” and “Farewell to Ballochmyle.” The more usual form is to represent a natural picture in contrast to the human emotion, as in “The Chevalier’s Lament,” “The Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots,” or best of all, “The Banks of Doon.”
Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair? How can ye chant ye little birds, And I sae weary, fu’ of care!
It is characteristic of Burns that his knowledge was wider and his sympathy keener in the realm of animate than of inanimate Nature. He apparently thought of animals almost as if they had been human. The address to a mouse is as tenderly and genuinely sympathetic as if it had been to a hurt child. On winter nights he listens to the wind and cannot sleep for thinking of the “ourie cattle” and “silly sheep” and helpless birds that “cow’r” with “chittering wing.”[510] He scorned hunting and said there was no warm poetic heart that did not inly bleed at man’s savage cruelty.[511] He found it impossible to reconcile so-called “sport” with his ideas of virtue.[512] He knew animals, especially birds, in an intimate, friendly fashion. In the description of their manners and habits there is the most minute realism. The following phrases are illustrative: “Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;” “Ye curlews calling thro’ a clud;” “Ye whirring paitrick brood;” “Ye fisher herons watching eels;” “sooty coots;” “speckled teals;” “whistling plover;”
Clam’ring craiks at close o’ day ’Mang fields o’ flow’ring clover gay;
and
Ye duck and drake, wi’ airy wheels Circling the lake.[513]
In accurate first-hand observation, in abundant knowledge, in the use of felicitous descriptive epithets, in great personal joy in Nature, in delight in winter, in love for animals, and in a critical estimate of the value of truthful portrayal, Burns represents the new spirit.
William Lisle Bowles is another of the reputed “fathers” of modern poetry. His slender title to the distinction thus conferred upon him by Rev. George Gilfillan,[514] rests on the admiration of Coleridge,[515] Southey,[516] and Lovel for his early poems.[517] From 1798 to the end of his life Bowles wrote constantly, so the list of his works is a long one; but in the present study we are concerned only with the poems before 1798, the ones that stirred Coleridge to abandon metaphysics for poetry.
From fourteen to nineteen years of age Bowles was in Winchester School under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Warton, who won the boy’s confidence and inspired him with his own tastes. In the “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” written eighteen years after these school days, Bowles says of Warton,
Thy cheering voice, O Warton! bade my silent heart rejoice, And wake to love of nature; every breeze On Itchen’s brink was melody; the trees Waved in fresh beauty; ... ... And witness thou Catherine, upon whose foss-encircled brow We met the morning, how I loved to trace The prospect spread around.... So passed my days with new delight.
Warton also taught him to love literature. He learned to read Greek poets with “young-eyed sympathy,” and he went with “holier joy” to
The lonely heights where Shakespeare sat sublime.
Charmed, the lad bent his soul
Great Milton’s solemn harmonies to hear.
“Unheeded midnight hours” were beguiled by the wild song of Ossian, and his fancy found a “magic spell” in the “Odes” of his master, Dr. Warton.
The influences of these early school days had awakened Bowles to love of Nature and of poetry, and when sorrow came it was to Nature and to poetry that he turned for relief. His “Sonnets” are the direct and genuine expression of a personal grief. They were composed, he says, during a tour in which he “sought forgetfulness of the first disappointment in early affections,”[518] and they are pervaded by a melancholy unmistakably real. But along with this deep sadness is a frequent recognition of the power of Nature to give at least temporary respite from grief. Not only does she “steep each sense in still delight,”[519] but she bestows “a soothing charm.”[520] The lovely sights and sounds of morning
Touch soft the wakeful nerve’s according string.[521]
The river Itchen brings “solace to his heart.”[522] After visiting the Cherwell he says:
Whate’er betide, yet something have I won Of solace, that may bear me on serene.[523]
In the midst of sorrow he is
Thankful that still the landscape beaming bright Can wake the wonted sense of pure delight.[524]
What Bowles saw in Nature was largely determined by his state of mind. His own sadness led him to a quick perception of the pensive or melancholy suggestions in any scene. He loved sequestered streams, romantic vales, the hush of evening. The sounds he heard were soft and plaintive. The river Wainsbeck makes “a plaintive song among its “mossy-scattered rocks.”[525] He listens to the wind and seems to hear a plaint of sorrow.[526] Sea sounds are
Like melodies that mourn upon the lyre.[527]
There is strange music in the stirring wind When lowers the autumnal eve.[528]
Of the bells at Ostend he says:
And hark! with lessening cadence now they fall; And now, along the white and level tide, They fling their melancholy music wide; Bidding me many a tender thought recall Of summer days, and those delightful years When from an ancient tower, in life’s fair prime, The mournful magic of their mingling chime First waked my wondering childhood into tears.[529]
Again, his own striving after self-control leads him to look with pleasure on such natural objects as have withstood the shock of tempests. Rugged Malvern Hill, on which the “parting sun sits smiling,” teaches him a lesson of victory over grief, and he exclaims,
Ev’n as thou Dost lift in the pale beam thy forehead high, Proud mountain! whilst the scattered vapours fly Unheeded round thy breast--so, with calm brow The shades of sorrow I may meet, and wear The smile unchanged of peace, though pressed by care![530]
Some of the brief descriptions in these sonnets are not without a certain beauty in themselves, as in this passage from “Dover Cliffs”:
On these white cliffs, that calm above the flood Uprear their shadowing heads, and at their feet Hear not the surge that has for ages beat, How many a lonely wanderer has stood! And, whilst the lifted murmur met his ear, And o’er the distant billows the still eve Sailed slow, has thought of all his heart must leave Tomorrow.
But here, as elsewhere in the poems, the chief thought is human grief; and the most important characteristic of the poems, taken as a whole, is the intimate union between the spirit of a man and the spirit of Nature. It was always Bowles’ theory, says Clark,[531] that Nature is the true subject of poetry; but he does not, in his later work, strike so true and simple a note as in these early sonnets.
Such general statements as are to be drawn from this study of specific poets can be more advantageously made after the chapters on “Fiction,” “Travels,” “Gardening,” and “Painting,” for these chapters offer facts that modify or confirm the impressions gained from the poetry.