Chapter XI

NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON.

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

“Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord;”

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

SHAKESPEARE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banquo replies:—

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

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

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

_Macb._ ’Twas a rough night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The power of hills is on thee.”

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

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

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

Again:—

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

And again:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for her fairest friend—

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

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

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

MILTON.

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

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

the shower pattering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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