Chapter XII (2)

Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all
attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the
glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the
fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never
remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any
so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light.

At the Col de Baume:

Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is passing along the
sky. The mists, which are shifting about and breaking in some
places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights,
to catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the
mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated
by the sun's rays....

At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th):

The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time
completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste
impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen
like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In
the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of
presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic
energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to
forebode and to indulge in presentiments.

On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness:

It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the
world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains
enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you
would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you
had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line
of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of
the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse
thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track
they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind
us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds
continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over
the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.

He sums up the impressions made on him with:

The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites
within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.

The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, was _Iphigenia_.

Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific observer.

He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the things what actually was not there.'

He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily.

The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this change, which led him, as he said in his _Treatise on Granite_,

from observation and description of the human heart, that part of
creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and
destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the
oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible.

The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and Palermo I have had many changes.'

For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once said:

It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly
and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day
and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most
delightful feeling.

The sea made a great impression upon him:

I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the
isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw
it; it crested high against the shore as it retired, it was about
noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my
own eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it
quitted it.

But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.' Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly.

Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly for this reason, he could not assimilate all the new impressions which poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, churches, palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; from Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786):

The country around is very pleasant; the village lies on the side
of a hill, or rather of a mountain, and at every step the
draughtsman comes upon the most glorious objects. The prospect is
unbounded. Rome lies before you, and beyond it on the right is
the sea, the mountains of Tivoli, and so on.

In Rome itself (Feb. 2nd, 1787):

Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is
impossible to form a conception without having witnessed it.

During Carnival (Feb. 21st):

The sky, so infinitely fine and clear, looked down nobly and
innocently upon the mummeries.

In the voyage to Sicily:

At noon we went on board; the weather being extremely fine, we
enjoyed the most glorious of views. The corvette lay at anchor
near to the Mole. With an unclouded sun the atmosphere was hazy,
giving to the rocky walls of Sorrento, which were in the shade, a
tint of most beautiful blue. Naples with its living multitudes
lay in full sunshine, and glittered brilliantly with countless
tints.

and on April 1st:

With a cloudy sky, a bright but broken moonlight, the reflection
on the sea was infinitely beautiful.

At first, Italy, and especially Rome, felt strange to him, in scenery, sky, contour, and colour. It was only by degrees that he felt at home there.

He refers to this during his second visit to Rome in a notable remark, which aptly expresses the faculty of apperception--the link between us and the unfamiliar, which enables mental growth.

June 16th, 1787:

One remark more! Now for the first time do the trees, the rocks,
nay, Rome itself, grow dear to me; hitherto I have always felt
them as foreign, though, on the other hand, I took pleasure in
minor subjects having some resemblance to those I saw in youth.

On August 18th, 1787, he wrote:

Yesterday before sunrise I drove to Acqua Acetosa. Verily, one
might well lose his senses in contemplating the clearness, the
manifoldness, the dewy transparency, the heavenly hue of the
landscape, especially in the distance.

In October, when he heard of the engagement of a beautiful Milanese lady with whom he had fallen in love:

I again turned me instantly to Nature, as a subject for
landscapes, a field I had been meanwhile neglecting, and
endeavoured to copy her in this respect with the utmost fidelity.
I was, however, more successful in mastering her with my eyes....
All the sensual fulness which that region offers us in rocks and
trees, in acclivities and declivities, in peaceful lakes and
lively streams, all this was grasped by my eye more
appreciatively, if possible, than ever before, and I could hardly
resent the wound which had to such degree sharpened my inward and
outward sense.

On leaving Rome, he wrote:

Three nights before, the full moon shone in the clearest heaven,
and the enchantment shed over the vast town, though often felt
before, was never felt so keenly as now. The great masses of
light, clear as in mild daylight, the contrast of deep shades,
occasionally relieved by reflexions dimly portraying details, all
this transported us as if into another, a simpler and a greater,
world.

The later diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more laconic and objective: for example, at Schaffhausen (Sept. 18th):

Went out early, 7.30, to see the Falls of the Rhine; colour of
water, green--causes of this, the heights covered by mist--the
depths clear, and we saw the castle of Laufen half in mist;
thought of Ossian. Love mist when moved by deep feeling.

At Brunnen:

Green of the lake, steep banks, small size of boatman in
comparison to the enormous masses of rock. One saw precipices
grown over by trees, summits covered by clouds. Sunshine over the
scene, one felt the formless greatness of Nature.

He was conscious of the great change in himself since his last visit there, and wrote to Schiller (Oct. 14th, 1797):

I remember the effect these things had upon me twenty years ago.
The total impression remained with me, but the details faded, and
I had a wonderful longing to repeat the whole experience and
correct my impressions. I had become another man, and therefore
it must needs appear different to me.

In later years he travelled a great deal in the Harz Mountains, to Carlsbad, Toplitz, the Maine, Marienbad, etc. After the death of his great friends, Schiller and Carl August, he was more and more lonely, and his whole outlook, with increasing years, grew more impersonal, his attitude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal plant was superseded by the theory of colours. But he kept fresh eyes for natural beauty into ripe age; witness this letter from Heidelberg, May 4th, 1808, to Frau von Stein:

Yesterday evening, after finishing my work, I went alone to the
castle, and first scrambled about among the ruins, and then
betook myself to the great balcony from which one can overlook
the whole country. It was one of the loveliest of May evenings
and of sunsets. No! I have really never seen such a fine view!
Just imagine! One looked into the beautiful though narrow Neckar
valley, covered on both sides with woods and vineyards and fruit
trees just coming into flower. Further off the valley widened,
and one saw the setting sun reflected in the Rhine as it flowed
majestically through most beautiful country. On its further side
the horizon was bounded by the Vosges mountains, lit up by the
sun as if by a fire. The whole country was covered with fresh
green, and close to me were the enormous ruins of the old castle,
half in light and half in shade. You can easily fancy how it
fascinated me. I stood lost in the view quite half an hour, till
the rising moon woke me from my dreams.

Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his Italian journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic and epic poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In sending _Der Jüngling und der Mühlbach_ to Schiller from Switzerland in 1797, he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material for idylls and elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is called.'

Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey to Sicily, 1787; among them were _Calm at Sea_:

Silence deep rules o'er the waters,
Calmly slumbering lies the main.

and _Prosperous Voyage_:

The mist is fast clearing,
And radiant is heaven,
Whilst Æolus loosens
Our anguish-fraught bond.

The most perfect of all such short poems was the _Evening Song_, written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is great and simple--the sun down.'

Every tree top is at peace.
E'en the rustling woods do cease
Every sound;
The small birds sleep on every bough.
Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou
Sleep in peace.

The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the
wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's
perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which
feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in
so many words in the _Night Song_; but it is all there, like the
united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.)

The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of Nature.

He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.

But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, 'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let him down upon inaccessible rocks.'

After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon everything about living things will be clear to me.'[13]

Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling.

As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her independent importance; he only assigned her a _rôle_ in relation to the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand, we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's _Night Thoughts_:

Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne
In rayless majesty now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world...
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;
An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc.

There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling heroes. For instance:

His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat
on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill.

Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when
it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy
breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams.

As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high;
as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of
battle.

As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each
other approached the heroes.

The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the
steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling
of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying
mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark
is the plain of death.

Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism.

In _The Influence of Natural Objects_ he described how a life spent with Nature had early purified him from passion:

Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made
A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods
At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine.
'Twas mine among the fields both day and night,
And by the waters all the summer long,
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile,
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons....

Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging

while the stars
Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in _Tintern Abbey_:

Nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
The colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow'd from the eye.

Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank pantheism of Byron.

What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[14] and Moore for Ireland, Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook home to range more widely, or Southey, whose _Thalaba_ begins with an imposing description of night in the desert:

How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air,
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven;
In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!

But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in Rousseau became poetry in Byron.

There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by thoughts of mankind.

Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.'

He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says:

Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a
sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit
life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it,
feeling and observing everything only as part of itself.

The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of _Childe Harold_ came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable interweaving of scenery and feeling:

The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew,
As glad to waft him from his native home....
But when the sun was sinking in the sea,
He seized his harp...
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o'er the waters blue;
The night winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew;
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native land, good-night!

He says of the beauty of Lusitania:

Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see
What Heaven hath done for this delicious land.
What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree!
What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!...
The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd,
The cork trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain moss, by scorching skies imbrown'd,
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep.
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,
Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.

Yet his spirit drives him away, 'more restless than the swallow in the skies.'

The charm of the idyllic is in the lines:

But these between, a silver streamlet glides....
Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook,
And vacant on the rippling waves doth look,
That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow.

The beauty of the sea and night in this:

The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve!
Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand....
How softly on the Spanish shore she plays,
Disclosing rock, and slope, and forest brown
Distinct....

Bending o'er the vessel's laving side
To gaze on Dian's wave-reflected sphere.

He reflects that:

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene....
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen
With the wild flock that never needs a fold,
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,--
This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd.
But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless ...
This is to be alone--this, this is solitude.

His preference for wild scenery shews here:

Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,
Though always changing, in her aspect mild;
From her bare bosom let me take my fill,
Her never-wean'd, though not her favour'd child.
O she is fairest in her features wild,
Where nothing polish'd dares pollute her path;
To me by day or night she ever smiled,
Though I have mark'd her when none other hath,
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.

He observes everything--now 'the billows' melancholy flow' under the bows of the ship, now the whole scene at Zitza:

Where'er we gaze, around, above, below,
What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!
Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound,
And bluest skies that harmonize the whole;
Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound
Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll
Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul.

This is full of poetic vision:

Where lone Utraikey forms its circling cove,
And weary waves retire to gleam at rest,
How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove,
Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast,
As winds come lightly whispering from the west,
Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep's serene;--
Here Harold was received a welcome guest;
Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle scene,
For many a job could he from Night's soft presence glean.

Feeling himself 'the most unfit of men to herd with man,' he is happy only with Nature:

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead.

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake.

Again:

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me, and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture; I can see
Nothing to loathe in Nature save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? Should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these?

Love of Nature was a passion with him, and when he looked

Upon the peopled desert past
As on a place of agony and strife,

mountains gave him a sense of freedom.

He praised the Rhine:

Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay,
Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,
Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.

and far more the Alps:

Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to shew
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.

On the Lake of Geneva:

Ye stars which are the poetry of heaven...
All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep.
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast,
All is concenter'd in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

And this is in the night. Most glorious night,
Thou wert not sent for slumber; let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black--and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.
But where of ye, oh tempests, is the goal?
Are ye like those within the human breast?
Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest?

The morn is up again, the dewy morn
With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contained no tomb.

In Clarens:

Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love,
Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought,
Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above
The very glaciers have his colours caught,
And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought
By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks,
The permanent crags, tell here of Love.

Yet

Ever and anon of griefs subdued
There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;
And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever; it may be a sound,
A tone of music, summer's eve or spring,
A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,
Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound.

The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature:

The roar of waters! from the headlong height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald; how profound
The gulf, and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent....
Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge
From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,
An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge,
Like Hope upon a deathbed.

The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight:

When the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night breeze waves along the air!

Underlying all his varying moods is this note:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are his passion:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin--his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
(_Childe Harold_.)

The day at last has broken. What a night
Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!
Though varied with a transitory storm,
More beautiful in that variety!...
And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky,
With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth.
(_Sardanapalus.)_

He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth:

Amidst Nature's native scenes,
Loved to the last, whatever intervenes
Between us and our childhood's sympathy
Which still reverts to what first caught the eye.
He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue,
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.
(_The Island_.)

and in _The Island_ he says:

How often we forget all time, when lone,
Admiring Nature's universal throne,
Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence!
Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves
Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares
Without a feeling in their silent tears?
No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres,
Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before
Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore.
(_The Island_.)

Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in _Werther_ and _Faust_, a pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress, and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact, the father of our modern 'world-pain.'

Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.'

We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line which proved so prophetic of his death:

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright;
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might....
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple sea-weeds strewn;
I see the waves upon the shore
Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown....
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,--
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

In his _Essay on Love_, speaking of the irresistible longing for sympathy, he says:

In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by
human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the
flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky. In the motion of
the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a
secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the
tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the
rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable
relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a
dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious
tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to
you alone.

As Brandes says: 'His pulses beat in secret sympathy with Nature's. He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, and the words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, "cor cordium," are true of his relation to Nature also.'

_The Cloud_, with its marvellously vivid personification, is a perfect example of his genius.

It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as one hears in the old mythologies.

_The Cloud_:

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast,
And all the night 'tis my pillow white
While I sleep in the arms of the Blast....
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;
The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove
While the moist earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky.

As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon:

When
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom Mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The Stars peep behind her and peer.

or of--

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the poet's imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were first moulded into mythology.

This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his poems, the _Ode to the West Wind_, when the poet says to the wind:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,...
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed.
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean.
Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm.

He calls the wind the 'breath of Autumn's being,' the one

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds.

And cries to it:

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!...
0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and sympathy in them; for instance:

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the river with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion....
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another...
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea.

and:

I love all thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight;
The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night,
Autumn evening and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves and winds and storms--
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a bitter ingredient in their poetry.

Let us now turn to France.

LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO

Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre portrayed it poetically, not only in _Paul and Virginia_, but in _Chaumiére Indienne_ and _Etudes de la Nature_. The science which these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination: he lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the mind and the phenomena of the outer world. Chateaubriand, on the contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent. It is true that his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling. He had Rousseau's melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those 'oppressive masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His Réné, that life-like figure, half-passionate, half-_blasé_, measuring everything by himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[15] 'It was not God whom I contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His works: I saw an unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the beauties of the sky, seemed to me disclosed by her breath. I would have bartered eternity for one of her caresses. I pictured her to myself as throbbing behind this veil of the universe which hid her from my eyes. Oh! why was it not in my power to rend the veil and press the idealized woman to my heart, to spend myself on her bosom with the love which is the source of my inspiration, my despair, and my life?'

In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine were like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was theism, not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made radical changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by a reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and Nature was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of creation.

In his _Génie du Christianisme_, Chateaubriand said:

The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his immensity
to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him in
communication with the scenes of Nature.

Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His _Meditations_ shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his love of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, _L'Isolement_:

Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes,
Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur:
Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes
Oò l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur.
An sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres,
Le crépuscule encore jette un dernier rayon;
Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres
Monte et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon.

_Le Soir_:

Le soir ramène le silence....
Venus se lève à l'horizon;
A mes pieds l'étoile amoureuse
De sa lueur mystérieuse
Blanchit les tapis de gazon.
De ce hêtre au feuillage sombre
J'entends frissonner les rameaux;
On dirait autour des tombeaux
Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre,
Tout-à-coup, détaché des cieux,
Un rayon de l'astre nocturne,
Glissant sur mon front taciturne,
Vient mollement toucher mes yeux.
Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme
Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu?
Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu
Porter la lumière à mon âme?
Descends-tu pour me révéler
Des mondes le divin mystére,
Ces secrets cachés dans la sphère
Où le jour va te rappeler?

In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake:

Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence;
On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux,
Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence
Tes flots harmonieux.
O lac! rochers muets! grottes! forêt obscure!
Vous que le temps épargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir
Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature,
Au moins le souvenir!...
Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire
Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé,
Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire,
Tout dise: 'ils out aimés!

_La Prière_ has:

Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire,
Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire;
Le nuage éclatant qui le cache à nos yeux
Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux,
Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'étendue.
Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur suspendue,
La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon;
Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon,
Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se déplie.
C'est l'heure, où la nature, un moment recueillie,
Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit
S'élève au créateur du jour et de la nuit,
Et semble offrir à Dieu dans son brillant langage,
De la création le magnifique hommage.
Voilà le sacrifice immense, universelle!
L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel;
Les cieux en sont le dôme et ses astres sans nombre,
Ces feux demi-voilés, pâle ornement de l'ombre,
Dans la voûte d'azur avec ordre semés,
Sont les sacrés flambeaux pour ce temple allumés...
Mais ce temple est sans voix...

...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence--
La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence.
Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent,
Elle s'élève à Dieu...

_Le Golfe de Baia_:

Vois-tu comme le flot paisible
Sur le rivage vient mourir?
Mais déjà l'ombre plus épaisse
Tombe et brunit les vastes mers;
Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse,
Le silence occupe les airs.
C'est l'heure où la Mélancholie
S'assied pensive et recueillie
Aux bords silencieux des mers.

The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings:

Oui, dans ces jours d'automne où la nature expire,
A ses regards voilés je trouve plus d'attraits;
C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire
Des lèvres que la mort va fermer pour jamais.

This is from _Ischia_:

Le Soleil va porter le jour à d'autres mondes;
Dans l'horizon désert Phébé monte sans bruit,
Et jette, en pénétrant les ténébres profondes,
Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit.
Voyez du haut des monts ses clartés ondoyantes
Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux,
Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes,
Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des eaux....
Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille,
Un son vague et plaintif se répand dans les airs....
Mortel! ouvre ton âme à ces torrents de vie,
Reçois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit....

He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in Nature:

L'onde qui baise ce rivage,
De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords?
Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage,
Rendent-ils de tristes accords?
De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise.

Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover.

Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the _Feuilles d'Automne_. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of _Faust_. He imagines himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before:

L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux!
C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux....
Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique
Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique
Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion,
Et louait la beauté de la création.

while from the other voice:

Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme....
C'était la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!...
L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanité!

The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from _Les Orientales_ remind one of St Augustine:

J'étais seul près des flots par une nuit d'étoiles,
Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles,
Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature
Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure
Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel.
Et les étoiles d'or, légions infinies,
A voix haute, à voix basse, avec mille harmonies
Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu,
Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrête,
Disaient en recourbant l'écume de leur crête:
C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu!

Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie
Sous le dôme étoilé qui sur nos fronts flamboie;
J'écoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit;
Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile
Quand je contemple ému cette fête eternelle
Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit!
Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme
Dans ce monde endormi n'échauffaient que mon âme;
Qu'à les comprendre seul j'étais prédestiné;
Que j'étais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne,
Le roi mystérieuse de la pompe nocturne;
Que le ciel pour moi seul s'était illuminé!

The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly given:

Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressées,
Un monde intérieur d'images, de pensées,
De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion
Pour féconder ce monde, échangez-le sans cesse
Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse!
Mêlez toute votre âme à la création....
Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature,
Cette immense clavier!

His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, too, at the root of German romanticism.

THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS

Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.

Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; _Evening_ shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_:

Laura, a sunrise seems to break
Where'er thy happy looks may glow....
Thy soul--a crystal river passing,
Silver clear and sunbeam glassing,
Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee:
Night and desert, if they spy thee,
To gardens laugh--with daylight shine,
Lit by those happy smiles of thine!

With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_, evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'