Chapter VIII

SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE.

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

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

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

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

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V.

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

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

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

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

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

VI.

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

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

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

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

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

VII.

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

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

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

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

Again Mr. Arnold says:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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