Chapter II (4)

Dr. Blair in his full study of the similitudes of Ossian admits that they are too “thick-sown,” and that they are drawn from a narrow range of objects. But he claims, on the other hand, that the similes have the exceptional vividness that comes from first-hand observation,[423] and that they show an imaginative perception of subtle analogies.[424] Dr. Blair’s recognition of beauty and congruity was so quickened by his partisanship of Ossian that his conclusions usually need to be scrutinized in the cold light of facts. The subtlety of the analogies certainly often escapes the ordinary reader, but no one can fail to observe the pathetic beauty of the little pictures into which the similitudes are often elaborated. Music, for instance, is compared to “the rising breeze, that whirls at first the thistle’s beard, then flies dark-shadowy over the grass.” Again a song is “like the voice of a summer breeze, when it lifts the head of flowers and curls the lakes and streams.” The heroes contended “like gales of spring, as they fly along the hill, and bend by turns the feebly-whistling grass.” The warriors are “bright as the sunshine before a storm; when the west wind collects the clouds, and Morven echoes over all her oaks.” In these and many similar comparisons we see how the beauty of the suggested natural picture led the poet into a use of details not necessary for his illustrations. The importance of the poetry of Ossian in the evolution of the poetry of Nature rests on its early date, its close interweaving of human emotions and natural scenes, and its abundant and appreciative use of wild, free Nature.

Percy’s “Reliques” appeared in 1765. The publication of these ballads was of great importance to the cause of the romantic revival in general. The ballads were, however, of somewhat less significance in their influence on the new feeling toward Nature. A ballad would never interrupt the story for a description, and there would, of course, never be any hint of a philosophy of Nature. But throughout the ballads there are casual touches of description showing a genuine love for some forms of Nature, especially the forest, green hills, and moors. “Upon the wide moors,” “on moors so broad,” “over the fields so brown,” “over the lea,” “over the downs,” are characteristic phrases. The castles are usually on a hill and command a wide view.[425] The love of the hills is indicated by such little pictures as

Robin sat on a gude grene hill,
Keipand a flock of fie.[426]

or,

Lord Thomas and fair Annet
Sate a’ day on a hill,
When night was cum and sun was sett
They had not talkt their fill.[427]

]But it is the forest that most often appears.

Until they came to the merry green wood,
Where they had gladdest bee,[428]

gives the fresh, open-air setting of most of these tales of love and heroism;

Mery it was in the grene forest
Amonge the leves grene;[429]

All in the merrye month of May,
When greene buds they were swellin;[430]

And wee’ll away to the greene forest;[431]

Gil Morice sate in gude grene wode,
He whistled and he sang;[432]

In summer time when leaves grow greene
And blossoms bedecke the tree;[433]

To the greene forest so pleasant and faire;[434]

He myght have dwelt in grene foreste,
Under the shadowes greene;[435]

The woodweele sang, and wold not cease
Sitting upon the spraye,
Soe lowde, he wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay;[436]

are typical forest pictures.[437] But the gude green wood is not always fresh and blooming, as we see from occasional lines such as

Now loud and shrill blew the westlin’ wind,
Sair beat the heavy shower;[438]

About Yule quhen the wind blew cule;[439]

Oft have I ridden thro’ Stirling town
In the wind both and the weit;[440]

No shimmering sun here ever shone;
No halesome breeze here ever blew;[441]

Trees are not often mentioned individually except the oak and the willow, the latter always representing sorrow.

There is occasional use of Nature in simple comparisons, as, “White as evir the snaw lay on the dike,” “drye as a clot of claye,” “light of foot as stag that runs in forest wild,” his “een like gray gosehawk’s stair’d wyld.”

There are also some homely pictures of everyday country life, as in “Take Thy Old Cloak about Thee,” “Plain Truth and Blind Ignorance” (Somersetshire dialect), “The Ew-Bughts Marion,” and “The Auld Good Man.”

The use of Nature in the “Ballads,” slight and limited as it is, gives an impression of vivid reality. It is what Schiller would call the simple as opposed to the sentimental love of Nature, the first being characteristic of early races who _are_ Nature, and the last of the moderns who _seek_ Nature.[442] On eighteenth-century readers who, as a class, knew little about the external world outside their parks and gardens, the effect of the descriptive touches in the “Ballads” would be to lead them into lovely regions where Nature was as spontaneous and free as the knights and fair ladies themselves.

Michael Bruce imitated Milton’s “Lycidas” in an elegy called “Daphnis” and imitated Gray in some “Runic Odes,” which were lauded as “truly Runic and truly Grayan.” In these poems the use of Nature is slight and conventional. His “Lochleven” (1766) is more significant. In this poem he celebrates

The pastoral mountains, the poetic streams

of his native land. He finds all Nature full of joy.

The vales, the vocal hills,
The woods, the waters, and the heart of man
Send out a general song; ’tis beauty all
To poet’s eye and music to his ear.

Clouds arrested in their swift course by lofty mountains, lakes that hold a mirror to the sky, songsters twittering o’er their young, waters glowing beneath western clouds, hoary-headed Grampius clad in snow, are counted among his pleasures. He prefers life in the country, for there

All in the sacred, sweet, sequestered vale
Of solitude, the secret primrose-path
Of rural life, he dwells.

He loved especially the Gairney, a stream that flows into Loch Leven, because, as a lad, he lay on its banks and composed poetry. He speaks with evident knowledge of other streams, the gulfy Po, “slow and silent among its waving reeds,” and the rapid Queech rushing impetuous over broken steeps. It is natural that Bruce should know, as he did, especially water birds. The “wild-shrieking gull,” “patient heron,” “dull bittern,” the “clamorous mew,” and the “slow-wing’d crane” moving heavily along the shore, were doubtless birds that he had often seen. Bruce’s pleasure in wide views is shown by this poem, “Lochleven,” for it is a description of the prospect spread out before him as he stands on “Mount Lomond.” Bruce’s “Elegy” was written when he felt himself dying of consumption. It represents his delight in all forms of Nature’s life and his deep melancholy at bidding farewell to the spring-time world.

By a process of selection we find in Bruce’s poems his real love for the outer world. This is not, however, the impression made by his poems as a whole. His knowledge of Nature was limited, and his expression was often rigid and formal. He died young, before he had really attained the mastery of his own thought, and his importance lies not so much in actual accomplishment as in scattered suggestions of his tendencies and possibilities.

Bruce’s most intimate friend was John Logan, who, in 1770, published an edition of Bruce’s poems and included some “wrote by other authors.” In 1781, when he published his own works, he laid claim to a number of the poems that had appeared in the edition of Bruce’s poems in 1770. Among these the most important was “The Cuckoo,”[443] a poem well worth the sharp controversy waged over it by the respective friends of the two authors. There is nothing else in this period that rings so fresh and clear as this little ode. One stanza may be quoted to illustrate its beauty, its simplicity, and naturalness. This stanza is also of peculiar interest because it so definitely foreshadows Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo.”

The schoolboy, wandering through the wood,
To pull the primrose gay,
Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,
And imitates thy lay.

Logan’s other poems, though he has nothing equal to the cuckoo song in spontaneity and exquisite simplicity, are yet of real value. His “Braes of Yarrow” is an effective presentation of the ancient, sorrow-laden Yarrow _motif_. As is fitting in a ballad, the touches of description are of the briefest sort, but the forest, the bonny braes, and the sounding stream are felt through all the plaintive story. “Ossian’s Hymn to the Sun” is a poetical paraphrase of the famous apostrophe in “Balclutha.” It has some fine lines, but is inferior in strength to the original. The “Ode Written in Spring” is a laudation of a certain fair Maria in the true classical fashion, but the new note is struck in the first five stanzas descriptive of spring.

The loosen’d streamlet loves to stray
And echo down the dale,

The hills uplift their summits green,

The cuckoo in the wood unseen,

At eve the primrose path along,
The milkmaid shortens with a song,
Her solitary way,

The sudden fields put on the flowers,

are lines showing fresh observation and easy, natural expression. Another passage characterizes autumn as “the Sabbath of the year.” Limited in compass as is Logan’s good work it is of value because marked by exceptional purity and sweetness.

Most of James Graeme’s poems were written before he was twenty. His tastes are thus referred to by his friend, Dr. Robert Anderson:

A passion for romantic fiction and fabulous history, appeared in
him very early in life.... Of the Gothic, Celtic and Oriental
mythology he was a warm admirer; and frequently attempted
imitations of the wild and flowery fictions of the northern and
eastern nations.... Like other votaries of the Muses, he was
passionately fond of rural scenery, and delighted in walking
alone in the fields.

His chief poems of Nature are some descriptive elegies. Occasionally there is a fairly good line, as

The torrents, whiten’d with descending rain,

or

The blue-gray mist that hovers o’er the hill,

showing at least a hint of first-hand observation. But on the whole the poems are a composite of phrases belonging to the typical poetry of sentimental melancholy. His characteristic attitude toward Nature is shown by his constant preference for chilly midnight when howlets scream and ravens croak, and when he, with pensive care, tunes the voice of woe and sheds “teary torrents” over grass-green graves. One poem, on “Curling,” is, however, quite different in tone, for it is a crudely realistic and technical description of the game and the peasants who engage in it. The tastes of Graeme and his attempts are of more significance than his actual work, which is of little value.

The bent of Goldsmith’s mind was toward the study of man in social relations. His use of Nature is accessory and limited. In “The Traveller” (1764) the real interest is in manners and customs.[444] When the pilgrim is in the Alps with a wide prospect before him, it is the thought of man’s grand heritage that impresses him. In the account of Switzerland there is only a vague general description of the country, but a full, sympathetic description of the peasant. So, too, in Italy, France, Holland, and even in England. In the few descriptions that do occur there are occasional lines indicative of first-hand observation, as in this picturesque couplet on the scenery in Holland:

The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail.

We also find effective combinations of geographical names that give a certain charm of remoteness and melody; and there is a sense of space and movement conveyed by the rapidly presented and wide landscapes.

In “The Deserted Village” (1770) the central thought is still man, and the purpose didactic, but there is effective though not abundant use of Nature. Even here, however, it is only Nature inseparably associated with man. Nine-tenths of the poem has to do directly with human nature. The other tenth merely gives charming pictures of the country close about a village. Scattered lines are of perfect workmanship, as that one descriptive of the straggling fence,

With blossomed furze unprofitably gay,

and

The breezy covert of the warbling grove.

In the picture of desolation the details are selected with delicacy and precision. Each touch helps the general impression. The value of such work becomes more apparent when put into contrast with the description of torrid climes. In Goldsmith and in Thomson what was seen at first hand had the grace and power of truth, but scenes in remote lands, known only through the distorting spectacles of books, were credited with an odd mixture of incongruous details. Except for one use of mountains in a simile there is no indication that Goldsmith knew any but tame scenery.

In general we may say that Goldsmith showed a direct, simple-hearted pleasure in the open-air world, that he was a sympathetic observer of the more obvious facts of Nature, and that he had a bright, easy way of recording those facts. The simplicity of his work is combined with a quick perception of artistic form. But he has hardly a touch of what Matthew Arnold calls “natural magic,” and he is in no sense a revealer. He was on the surface of things. Of the higher ministry of Nature to man’s spiritual needs he knew nothing.

In his prose works Goldsmith has several vigorous attacks on falseness and affectation in poetry. In 1759 he characterized Italian poetry at its lowest ebb, as “no longer an imitation of what we see, but of what a visionary might wish. The zephyrs breathe a most exquisite perfume; the trees wear eternal verdure; fauns, dryads, and hamadryads stand ready to fan the sultry shepherdess ... who is so simple and innocent as often to have no meaning.” This attack on the falseness and affectation of Italian poetry might be quoted verbatim by a modern critic of the popular eighteenth-century pastorals. Goldsmith also praised Gay’s poems saying that “he has hit upon the true spirit of pastoral poetry.” Goldsmith has other keen critical remarks that point in the direction of the new spirit but they do not bear directly on the study of Nature. He is important chiefly because of his interest in man as man, his close and sympathetic delineation of the poor and ignorant.

In 1766 James Beattie had written 150 lines of “The Minstrel.” The poem was then laid aside for the “Essay on Truth” and not taken up again till 1770. The first book was published anonymously in 1771. The second book appeared with the author’s name in 1774. The poem consists of 122 Spenserian stanzas. Its design is “to trace the progress of a poetical genius ... till that period when he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a minstrel,”[445] and its theme is really the effect of mountain scenery on a poetically sensitive mind. The child, Edwin, is brought up in a remote village among the Scotch hills, and his genius is developed through the varied influence of wild natural scenery until he becomes “itinerant poet and musician.” As a lad his chief pleasure was to follow

Where the maze of some bewilder’d stream
To deep untrodden groves his footsteps led.

He loved to climb craggy cliffs

When all in mist the world below was lost.
What dreadful pleasure! There to stand sublime
Like shipwreck’d mariner on desert coast
And view the enormous waste of vapour, toss’d
In billows, lengthening to the horizon round,
Now scoop’d in gulfs, with mountains now emboss’d.

And oft he traced the uplands, to survey,
When o’er the sky advanced the kindling dawn,
The crimson cloud, blue main and mountain gray.

He was

Fond of each gentle, and each dreadful scene.
In darkness and in storm he found delight.

He listened

with pleasing dread, to the deep roar
Of the wide-weltering waves.

When storms came up in black array

He hastened from the haunt of man,
Along the trembling wilderness to stray.

He visited haunted streams by moonlight and let his imagination dwell on graves and ghosts. His soul was possessed by the “mystic transports” born of “melancholy and solitude.” He scanned all Nature with a “curious and romantic eye,” and his imagination was stirred by “old heroic ditties,” by

What’er of lore tradition could supply
From gothic tale, or song, or fable old.

The second stage of Edwin’s education comes through his companionship with a wise hermit, who, like Wordsworth’s Solitary, had “sought for glory in the paths of guile,” but finally, dissatisfied with success and stung with remorse, had hidden himself in a deep retired abode in the mountains, there to commune with Nature. From a lofty eminence Edwin chanced to look down one day upon this savage dell, shut in by mountains and rocks piled on rocks, and he saw the “one cultivated spot” with its garden of roses and herbs, and he heard the voice of the hermit soliloquizing on the vanity of human life. In subsequent interviews the hermit discoursed learnedly on history, art, and sciences.

The intrinsic value of this poem is not great. It is important because of the conception which it embodies. Edwin finds in Nature adequate instruction and inspiration; the hermit, adequate consolation. His words are,

Hail, awful scenes, that calm the troubled breast,
And woo the weary to profound repose!
Can passion’s wildest uproar lay to rest,
And whisper comfort to the man of woes?

Now the power of wild scenery over the plastic mind is exactly Wordsworth’s idea in his account of the Wanderer’s youth,[446] and the power of Nature to minister to a mind diseased is one of the leading thoughts in his account of the Solitary,[447] while the thought of tracing a child’s experiences with Nature until under her tutelage he becomes a poet is the fundamental idea of the “Prelude.”[448] It is certainly of more than merely curious interest thus to find in the rather vague, ineffective stanzas of the earlier poet general conceptions which afterward appear as the ruling ideas of the poet confessedly greatest in his treatment of Nature.

The character of Edwin was autobiographic and shows Beattie’s personal love of Nature. In a letter to the Dowager Lady Forbes, October, 1772, he wrote:

I find you are willing to suppose that, in Edwin, I have
given only a picture of myself as I was in my younger days. I
confess the supposition is not groundless. I have made him take
pleasure in the scenes in which I took pleasure, and entertain
sentiments similar to those of which, even in my early youth, I
had repeated experience. The scenery of a mountainous country,
the ocean, the sky, thoughtfulness and retirement, and sometimes
melancholy objects and ideas, had charms in my eyes, even when
I was a school boy; and at a time when I was so far from being
able to express, that I did not understand my own feelings, or
perceive the tendency of my own pursuits and amusements.

Beattie never lost this keen delight in Nature. When he was schoolmaster at Fordoun, at the foot of the Grampian Hills, his greatest pleasure was found in the neighboring mountains and wooded glens. His biographer also says that he would frequently “pass the whole night among the fields, gazing on the sky, and observing the various aspects it assumed till the return of day.” Beattie’s poems bear conclusive evidence of his love of Nature in all her forms. Mountains, and the sea, wild scenes of various sorts, storms, torrents, night, clouds, the sky, streams, meadows, groves, summer and winter, wide views, are regarded with genuine delight. But there are certain curious limitations. There are almost no specific flowers, birds, or trees mentioned in all this abundant study of the external world. This use of the general instead of the specific is one element of an effect too often perceived, an indefiniteness of outline, a vague blurring of edges, the result of which is not mysterious suggestiveness but simply dimness and confusion. There is also an unexpected feebleness of vocabulary and lack of direct observation. The old word “murmur,” for instance, is applied with wearisome insistence to springs, rills, water, the ocean, pines, woods, groves, and gales. So the interest in wild Nature, when analyzed, shows a rather monotonous and undiscriminating succession of cliffs and precipices. But it would be unfair to press these limitations too far. There are many true observations happily presented, as in the following lines which are selected as illustrative:

While waters, woods, and winds in concert join.

The wild brook babbling down the mountain side.

Torrents
Heard from afar amid the lonely night.

And now the storm of summer rain is over
And cool and fresh and fragrant is the sky.

When by the winds of autumn driven
The scatter’d clouds fly ’cross the Heaven.
Oft have we from some mountain’s head
Beheld the alternate light and shade
Sweep along the vale.

The scared owl on pinions gray
Breaks from the rustling boughs
And down the lone vale sails away
To more profound repose.

He finds pleasure in old oak trees that

from the stormy promontory tower
And toss their giant arms amid the skies.

In winter he watches

The cloud stupendous, from the Atlantic wave
High towering, sail along the horizon blue.

Lines such as these show knowledge both fresh and close, and the expression is marked by picturesque effectiveness.

But Beattie’s real contribution to the study of Nature lies, as has been indicated, in his own personal enthusiasm, and his steadfast belief in the effect of Nature on man. In one stanza he even set forth the doctrine, held to be sufficiently startling forty years later in Wordsworth’s day, that country rustics from their familiarity with Nature, gain a nicer sense of moral purity than is known among the poor of a city.[449] Upon all men he urged the study of Nature as a moral duty.

These charms shall work thy soul’s eternal health,
And love, and gentleness, and joy impart.[450]

The message of Nature is one not to be ignored.

O how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain’s sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of Heaven,
O how canst thou renounce and hope to be forgiven![451]

Though less popular than the “Essay on Truth,” Beattie’s “Minstrel” met with almost immediate favor. Lyttleton said to Mrs. Montagu who sent him the first book in 1771:

I read your “Minstrel” last night, with as much rapture as
poetry, in her noblest, sweetest charms, ever raised in my soul.
It seemed to me that my once most beloved minstrel, Thomson, was
come down from heaven, refined by the converse of purer spirits
than those he lived with here, to let me hear him sing again the
beauties of virtue.[452]

And Cowper wrote in 1784: “Though I cannot afford to deal largely in so expensive a commodity as books, I must afford to purchase at least the poetical works of Beattie.”[453] Mr. Dyce says that the success of “The Minstrel” (Book First) “was complete. The voice of every critic was loud in its praise; and before the second book appeared, four editions of the first had been dispersed throughout the kingdom.”[454]

“The Minstrel” is of importance in the historical development of the poetry of Nature because of the ideas it emphasizes, and because its immediate popularity is an indication of the change in taste since the beginning of the century.

Most of John Scott’s poems were on rural subjects,[455] and he is of especial interest because of his abundant and close observation of natural facts. Mr. Hoole says of him, “He was certainly no servile copyist of the thoughts of others; for living in the country, and being a close and accurate observer, he painted what he saw;” and again, “He cultivated the knowledge of natural history and botany, which enabled him to preserve the truth of Nature with many discriminating touches, perhaps not excelled by any descriptive poet since the days of Thomson.” It was Scott’s avowed purpose to enrich poetry by the use of many natural facts not before observed. In the introduction to the “Amoebaean Eclogues” he said, “Much of the rural imagery which our country affords, has already been introduced in poetry, but many obvious and pleasing appearances seem to have totally escaped notice. To describe these is the business of the following Eclogues.” After this explicit announcement, two gentle youths, in responsive verse, call attention to over two hundred rapidly stated natural facts. A fact to a line is about the average, as in these lines:

These pollard oaks their tawny leaves retain,
These hardy hornbeams yet unstripped remain;
The wint’ry groves all else admit the view
Through naked stems of many a varied hue.

Old oaken stubs tough saplings there adorn.[456]

Straight shoots of ash with bark of glossy gray,
Red cornel twigs, and maple’s russet spray.

There scabious blue, and purple knapweed rise,
And weld and yarrow show their various dyes.

In shady lanes red foxglove bells appear
And golden spikes the downy mullens rear.

The second of these “Eclogues” has to do with the care of farms and is as minute as Cowper’s treatise on the cucumber. There is nowhere in these poems any poetical fusion of facts. They read rather like the notebooks of a professional observer. Yet it is certainly significant to find at this date so persistent and systematic a search for natural facts, and that not in the service of science but of poetry. In “Amwell” Scott calls on the Muse of Thomson, Dyer, and Shenstone for his inspiration. The poem is a description of the prospect from a certain “airy height” near Amwell. A single illustration will show the minute observation and catalogue style in this commemoration of “lonely sylvan scenes.”

How picturesque
The slender group of airy elm, the clump
Of pollard oak, or ash, with ivy brown
Entwin’d; the walnut’s gloomy breadth of boughs,
The orchard’s ancient fence of rugged pales,
The haystack’s dusty cone, the moss-grown shed,
The clay-built barn; the elder-shaded cot.
Whose whitewashed gable prominent through green
Of waving branches shows; ...
... the wall with mantling vines
O’erspread, the porch with climbing woodbine wreath’d.
And under sheltering eaves the sunny bench
Where brown hives range, whose busy tenants fill
With drowsy hum the little garden gay,
Whence blooming beans, and spicy herbs, and flowers,
Exhale around a rich perfume! Here rests
The empty wain; there idle lies the plough.

There is a pleasant homely grace in these lines about the cottage, worth more than all the historical episodes “introduced to secure interest.” In the “Elegies” and “Odes” there is no use of Nature different from that observed in the other poems, unless, indeed, mention should be made of Scott’s belief that Nature gives her fairest smiles to those “who know a Saviour’s love.” One further characteristic is to be found in a large number of the poems, and that is enjoyment of a wide view. He describes views as seen from “Musla’s cornclad heights,” from “Grove Hill,” the cliff at Bath, from “Chadwell’s cliffs,” from “Widbury’s prospect-yielding hill,” from “Upton’s elm-divided plains,” from “Clifton’s rock,” from Amwell, and other spots. The poems read as if he had spent many days climbing hills and prospecting for views.

Richard Cumberland wrote in 1776 several “Odes,” something in the style of Gray’s “Bard,” in honor of the artist Romney. In the “Dedication to Romney” he spoke with enthusiasm of the Lake Region.

In truth a more pleasing tour than these lakes hold out to men
of leisure and curiosity cannot be devised. We penetrate the
Glaziers, traverse the Rhone and the Rhine, whilst our domestic
lakes of Ulls-water, Keswick, and Windermere, exhibit scenes
in so sublime a stile, with such beautiful colourings of rock,
wood, and water, backed with so tremendous a disposition of
mountains, that if they do not fairly take the lead of all the
views of Europe, yet they are indisputably such as no English
traveller should leave behind him.

One of the poems, the “Ode to the Sun,” has Helvellyn, Skiddaw, the Derwent, Lodore, “Keswick’s sweet fantastic vale,” “stately Windermere,” “Savage Wyburn,” and “delicious Grasmere’s calm retreat” as its important scenic elements. He considers

The prim canal, the level green,
The close-clipt hedge, that bounds the flourish’d scene

as but “the spruce impertinence of art.” From them comes no rapture such as that excited by the “gigantic shapes” of mountains. The Thames is but a tame stream compared with “old majestic Derwent” forcing his independent course. In contrast to the grandeur and splendor of Nature man seems but “weak, contemptible, and vain, the tenant of a day.” Imperial Ulls-water is not only declared to be superior in charm to Loch Lomond or Killarney, but it can maintain its own even against “ought that learned Poussin drew” or anything painted by “dashing Rosa.” Eighteenth-century praise of scenery could go no farther.

William Blake’s “Poetical Sketches,” published in 1783, were written between 1769 and 1777.[457] The “Songs of Innocence” appeared in 1788–9; “Book of Thel,” 1789; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790; and “Songs of Experience” in 1794. In the first volume Nature was the leading subject; in the next human interests were in the ascendent, and Nature was used only in fresh, ballad-like touches. In the later work Nature is slightly used and for the most part in the form of mystical symbolism.

It was Blake’s theory that man is “imprisoned in his five senses,” and he counted it his mission to reveal to closed eyes the spiritual as the only real fact of existence. In his early work this theory, as yet unexaggerated in application, led to a treatment of Nature, not untrue to facts, but characterized especially by qualities of simplicity and vision such as are not found again before Wordsworth. In these years of his youth Blake was essentially the poet of childhood and spring in all their sweet, potent, indefinable charm.

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear,[458]

gives the keynote to these songs of delight. The joy of Nature is everywhere insisted on. The sun makes the sky happy; the vales rejoice; spring cannot hide its joy when buds and blossoms come; the happy blossoms look on merry birds; groves are happy and green woods rejoice; dimpling streams, the air, green hills, meadows, and birds laugh with delight. Here is one exquisite example:

The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.[459]

He contrasts the clamor and destruction of city streets with the true joy in Nature. In the silent woods, delights blossom around, numberless beauties blow. The green grass springs in joy, and the nimble air kisses the leaves. The brook stretches its arms along the silent meadow, its silver inhabitants sport and play. The youthful sun joys like a hunter roused to the chase.[460] In “Fragments” and “Couplets,” excerpts from his MS book, occurs this fine, though casual statement of the opposition between town and country:

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
These are not done by jostling in the street.

Blake cared much for sleep as the time when man was most free from the tyranny of the senses. Many of his characters are represented as asleep, and the conception is transferred to many lovely scenes in Nature. He pictures summer as sleeping beneath oaks; flowers shut their eyes in sleep; the west wind sleeps on the lake; and dawn sleeps in heaven. With this is associated an evident pleasure in the silence of Nature, apparently the pathetic complement of its joys. There is a silent sleep over the deep of heaven; the evening star speaks silence to the lake. At night the moon is silent, and the earth, and the sea.

Occasional passages show the character of Blake’s own love of Nature, as,

I love to rise on a summer morn,
I love the laughing vale,
I love the echoing hill.

His feeling toward flowers was as intimate, as tenderly protecting, as was that of Burns toward small animals. Sun and stars, winds, clouds, dew, and angels are represented as caring for the happy blossoms.

All of Blake’s poetry of Nature is as freshly beautiful as the dewy mornings, the spring-time green, the shining skies, as clear and transparent as the limpid, dimpling streams he loved. There are also frequent passages that besides their metrical flow and exquisite charm of external suggestion seem to reveal the essential spirit of the object described. One of the loveliest examples is the word of the Lily of the Valley.

I am a watry weed,
And I am very small and love to dwell in lowly vales:
So weak the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head.
Yet I am visited from heaven; and He that smiles on all
Walks in the valley, and each morn over me spreads his hand.
Saying, Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lilly flower,
Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks;
For thou shalt be clothed in light and fed with morning manna.[461]

For fine contrasts, each poem perfect of its kind, see “The Lamb” and “The Tiger.” The modest simplicity of the one is as adequately portrayed as the dread magnificence of the other. There is no description. There is interpretation of the most penetrating sort.

He has also frequent similes worked out with picturesque detail, as in this one from “The Couch of Death”:

He was like a cloud tossed by the winds, till the sun shines,
and the drops of rain glisten, the yellow harvest breathes,
and the thankful eyes of villagers are turned up in smiles;
the traveller, that hath taken shelter under an oak, eyes the
distant country with joy.

One secret of the effectiveness of Blake’s best work is his recognition of the unity of all existence. The prefatory stanza to “Auguries of Innocence,”

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour,

is a brief poetic statement of the creed afterward elaborated in Wordsworth’s “Primrose on the Rock” and Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” The thought back of the lines is the one in Wordsworth’s mind when he looked on “the meanest flower that blows.” It is this underlying consciousness of essential spiritual unity in all existence that gives to the work of both Blake and Wordsworth its subtle power.

There could hardly be two more dissimilar ways of approaching Nature than those of John Scott and William Blake. They stand at opposite poles, the one with no sense of unity, no power of poetic fusion or interpretation, but with a wide, accurate, and often picturesque assemblage of natural facts; the other with a prevailing tone of unreality and mysticism, a fine scorn of the actual, but with a swift recognition of the spirit of Nature, and an abiding sense of cosmic unity. Yet each represents a characteristic phase of the new feeling for Nature as seen in Wordsworth. On the one hand, the practiced eye and the inevitable ear; on the other, the vision and the faculty divine.

In its significance as a prophecy of Wordsworth and Shelley, the early poetry of William Blake is of especial importance.

Crabbe’s poetry falls into two periods, the first one closing with “The Newspaper” in 1785, and the second beginning with “The Parish Register” after an interval of twenty-two years. In the first of these periods we find but slight use of external Nature. The occasional similitudes are of a formal conventional type. The two longest descriptive passages are of a dismal winter scene,[462] and of some sterile summer fields that mock man’s need with profitless blooms.[463] There is no expression of pleasure in Nature. It is her pitiless, anti-human aspects that Crabbe sees. The charm of Nature independent of utility seems to have no meaning for him. He consciously repudiates

Clear skies, clear streams, soft banks, and sober bowers,
Deer, whimpering brooks, and wind-perfuming flowers,

as unworthy poetic material.[464] Rough or barren Nature as the background or occasion of man’s misery is the thought of these early poems.

Crabbe’s second period does not properly belong in a study of development which has “The Lyrical Ballads” as its _terminus ad quem_, but it may be briefly spoken of here because of the interesting contrast it offers to the first period. A suggestive study might be made of the descriptive element in “The Village” (1783) as compared with that of “The Borough” (1810). The scene of each is a seaside village on the Suffolk coast, but we note many changes in the presentation. In the first place, in “The Borough” Nature plays a much more important part than in “The Village.” There is a leisurely elaborateness of description as if the poet enjoyed the work for its own sake. There is, to be sure, insistence on the ugly realistic details of the scenes about a country town, but there is in addition a recognition that even along this rocky coast and in these barren fields where Nature defies man’s industry there may be found her gift of beauty. The “greedy ocean” of “The Village” is now “a glorious page of nature’s book” on which the poorest may gaze with delight. The firm, fair sands on quiet summer evenings, the lovely “limpid blue and evanescent green” as shadows run over the waves on a fresh day, serene winter-views where strange effects of fog add mystery to the scene, the majesty of a storm at sea--all these are now reckoned a part of the pleasures of the poor in a seaside village. The sterile fields, too, have rare blossoms and curious grasses. There are pleasant walks with every scene rich in beauty. The evening twilight is sweet with jasmine odors.[465] “The Borough” is as realistic as “The Village,” but it has a broader outlook and depicts the attractive as well as the forbidding aspects of the Suffolk coast near Aldborough. In later poems the scope becomes still wider. Besides the frequent strong and truthful ocean pictures there are some beautiful descriptions of autumn days, moonlight nights, and soft, rich inland scenes. It is especially noteworthy that though there are seldom any gay or bright aspects of Nature presented, yet Nature is no longer represented as a force inimical to man. On the contrary, there is something in even her most useless forms that gives to man a strangely profound pleasure. The simple music of a cascade has in it a soothing power that words will not express. In the clear, silent night there is a quiet joy that lessens the sting of mortal pain. These positive expressions of pleasure in Nature are not numerous, but they are important as marking a distinct change of tone. They are the more significant because they occur chiefly in the poems after 1819.

Yet it must not pass unnoticed that what Crabbe wrote in these late poems, he had perceived and felt in his youth. In his description of Richard he gives an account of his own boyhood. Of the ocean he says,

I loved to walk where none had walked before
About the rock that ran along the shore.

* * * * *

Here had I favorite stations, where I stood
And heard the murmurs of the ocean flood,
With not a sound beside, except when flew
Aloft the lapwing, or the gray curlew.

* * * * *

Pleasant it was to view the sea-gulls strive
Against the storm, or in the ocean dive
With eager scream, or when they dropping gave
Their closing wings to sail upon the wave.

* * * * *

Nor pleased it less around me to behold
Far up the beach the yesty sea-foam rolled;
Or from the shore upborne, to see on high
Its frothy flakes in wild confusion fly:
While the salt spray that clashing billows form
Gave to the taste a feeling of the storm.[466]

He recalls how he explored every creek and bay, how he took long walks over the hilly heath and mossy moors. Most of the scenery in “The Borough” as well as that in “The Village” is a memory picture of the country he knew so well in boyhood. It seems strange that this genuine love and accurate knowledge of Nature should not have found fuller expression in his early poetry. The explanation is perhaps twofold. His interest was primarily in man. He said that the finest scenes in Nature were less attractive to him than faces on a crowded street. He meant to be the portrait painter of poor people as he had seen them in a seaside village. His bitter pictures of country vice and ignorance and folly had in them no touch of patronage or contempt. He simply gave a hard, truthful representation of sordid life, and Nature had no meaning for him except as it was brought into connection with that life. When in after years his own lot was a happier one, and when a wider experience had brought him into contact with thrifty country folk, the bitterness of his early thought of man was greatly modified. With new views of man came an openness of mind to the gentler aspects of Nature. The real love of his boyhood, no longer crushed down by an over-mastering sense of human misery, was allowed free play. Furthermore, his later work was doubtless influenced by the new spirit of poetry about him. His son says that while at first but a cool admirer of the Lake poets, he came soon to love them and took no books oftener in his hands. All of Crabbe’s work in which there is much use of Nature comes more than ten years after the “Lyrical Ballads,” hence his growingly full use of Nature might easily be due in part to the influence of the new school of poetry. His free life, the different class of peasants he saw, the new poetry he was reading, would all have their effect in turning his attention to Nature. But the Nature he chose to write about was that which he had known and loved as a boy.

William Cowper as a poet of Nature, is marked first by the narrowness of the limits within which he writes. Mountains[467] are merely mentioned. Night is nowhere described. Moonlight plays no part in his poetry.[468] The stars are occasionally spoken of, but only in a conventional manner as “shining hosts,” “fair ministers of light,” or “beamy fires.” Of wild scenery there is none. The nearest approach to it is in two brief descriptions of rocky bluffs on the seashore.[469] His references to the ocean are brief and not of much importance; nor are there any storms except in a few lines about “a driving, dashing rain” with thunder and lightning used as an “apt similitude.”[470] The one winter storm is merely a gentle fall of snow that comes after the evening curtains are tight drawn.[471] The similitudes, though often carefully elaborated, show little if any new use of Nature, and they are drawn from a small number of natural facts.[472]

The explanation of this narrowness of limit is twofold. Cowper described only what he had seen,[473] and he had seen no country but his own, and only a very small and comparatively uninteresting portion of that. The Downs about Bath, where he seems to have been for a short time when he was about eighteen, was the nearest approach to wild scenery that he had ever known. During the seventeen years before the writing of “The Task” (1785) he had seldom left Olney, and never for a fortnight together.[474] His knowledge was further limited by his continued ill-health. He was ignorant of certain phases of the out-door world simply because his physical infirmities kept him in the house.

This explanation of the narrow range of the Nature in Cowper’s poetry is not entirely satisfactory, for when we come to his letters we find suggestions of a wider experience and sympathy than the poems would indicate. In a letter to Joseph Hill he wrote:

I was always an admirer of thunderstorms, even before I knew
whose voice I heard in them; but especially an admirer of
thunder rolling over the great waters. There is something
singularly majestic in the sound of it at sea, where the eye
and the ear have uninterrupted opportunity of observation, and
the concavity above, being made spacious, reflects it with more
advantage.... We have indeed been regaled with some of those
bursts of ethereal music.... But when the thunder preaches, an
horizon bounded by the ocean is the only sounding board.

To the Rev. William Unwin, September 26, 1781, he wrote:

I think, with you, that the most magnificent object under heaven
is the great deep; and can not but feel an unpolite species of
astonishment when I consider the multitudes that view it without
emotion, and even without reflection. In all its various forms
it is an object of all others the most suited to affect us with
lasting impressions of the awful power that created and controls
it. I am the less inclined to think this negligence excusable,
because, at a time of life when I gave as little attention to
religious subjects as any man, I yet remember that the waves
would preach to me, and that in the midst of dissipation I had
an ear to hear them. One of Shakespeare’s characters says, “I
am never merry when I hear sweet music.” The same effect that
harmony seems to have had upon him I have experienced from the
sight and sound of the ocean, which have often composed my
thoughts into a melancholy not unpleasing nor without its use.

He had also, during these years at Olney, made many an imaginary evening journey to remote lands by means of books of travel, of which he was especially fond. But when he came to write poems, only what he had known at first hand and with long familiarity occurred to him. Experiences merely casual, or remote in time, and facts gained from books slipped away. He remembered only what he habitually saw. The scenes about Olney he knew, literally, by heart, and of these he wrote.

A characteristic excellence of Cowper’s treatment of Nature is that, within his narrow circuit, his knowledge is of unusual fulness and accuracy. The charm of truthful description is everywhere apparent. In pictures of homely country occupations, such as feeding the hens,[475] foddering the cattle,[476] cutting wood,[477] plowing,[478] threshing,[479] there are no false touches, no hasty work. All is the result of first-hand, leisurely, sympathetic observation. His description of the garden is from memory, but it almost seems as if he were walking from flower to flower and taking notes, so minute is the characterization, so exact each epithet in the representation of the various colors, forms, odors, and ways of growth of the flowers in this garden that the poet sees under the snows of winter.[480]

The same love of precise detail is illustrated in his descriptions of trees. In noting their color he does not, like Thomson, enjoy general, broadly inclusive words, but he gives the exact shade and tells to what tree it belongs. When he takes a walk he sees that the trunks of the ash, the lime, and the beech shine distinctly under their shadowy foliage. The willow is a “wannish gray.” The poplar is likewise gray, but there is a touch of silver in the lining of the leaves. The elm is deeper green than the ash, and the oak of a deeper green still. The maple, the beech, and the lime have glossy leaves that shine in the sun. The sycamore changes from green to tawny, and then to scarlet, according to the season.[481]

This highly differentiated knowledge is evident also in various passages on the sounds of Nature. In a letter to Newton he wrote: “The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception; ... and as to insects ... in whatever key they sing, from the gnat’s fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all.”

Equally specific is his record of the sounds from winds and waters, as in these lines:

Rills that slip
Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall
Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length
In matted grass that with a livelier green
Betrays the secret of their silent course.[482]

Or these about forest sounds:

Mighty winds
That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood
Of ancient growth, make music not unlike
The dash of ocean on his winding shore.[483]

In wider descriptions, as of extended views, there is absolutely no blurring of edges. The picture is as clear, distinct, and exact as a photograph. There is no inartistic mixing of foreground and background. A good example is the view described in the first book of “The Task.”[484] The eye travels over the landscape with its river shining like molten glass; on its banks droop the elms, on either side are level plains sprinkled with cattle, beyond is the sloping land covered with hedgerows, groves, heaths, with here and there a square tower or tall spire, and in the distance smoking towns; and at last the scene is lost in the clouds on the horizon.

Many little pictures, complete in a few lines, serve even better to illustrate the exquisite truth of Cowper’s work. Note this description of the shifting lights in a forest pathway:

While beneath
The chequered earth seems restless as a flood
Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves
Play wanton, every moment, every spot.[485]

Or this of the squirrel just come from winter quarters in some lonely elm:

Flippant, pert, and full of play:
He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,
Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush,
And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud,
With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm
And anger insignificantly fierce.[486]

Equally felicitous are the descriptions of tall grass fledged with icy feathers on a frosty morning,[487] or of the redbreast in a sheltered woodland path in winter.[488] These pictures and other similar ones immediately take a permanent place in one’s mental picture gallery. It would be difficult indeed for a painting to make the light dance as it does in that forest path. The squirrel absolutely tingles with life. The right word comes easily and the lines show exquisite deftness of literary touch. It is rare in any poetry to find more excellent examples of pure description than these and other passages in “The Task.” Cowper had the mind that watches and receives. He looked about him and wrote down in simple, sincere words the loveliness he found. He took notes, but they were of the right sort, mental and unconscious, the inevitable imprint on a sensitive mind of scenes that had ministered to his deepest need.

The ministry of Nature to human needs is a cardinal principle in Cowper’s poetry. Nor was this conception merely theoretic. It was rather a transcript from his own experience. From childhood he had loved Nature,[489] and poems about Nature,[490] and he had always planned to live in the country.[491] After years of disappointment and terrifying fears, comparative peace came to him amid quiet country scenes. The instincts of his early days revived. Nature offered him a paradise of rich delights. She enchanted him. She gave him heart-consoling joys. She sweetened his bitter life, alluring him with smiles from gloom to happiness. The glory of each new morning was a lesson in hope. He found in Nature the nurse of wisdom, a power that could compose his passions and exalt his mind. He felt that in the country God spoke directly to his heart.[492]

The obverse of this genuine love of the country is an equally genuine detestation of the town and town standards. The crowds that swarm to city streets are the subjects of repeated invectives, and there is even more emphatic scorn of sham lovers of Nature, as cockneys in suburban villas; girls who but for the show and dress-parade of the country would hurry back to the city; men who love hunting and fishing, and call it a love of Nature; sentimentalists, who exclaim over Thomson’s poetry, but prefer to read it in the city.[493] His own relationship with Nature was too intimate and too sacred to admit of indifference or profanation on the part of others.

Cowper’s literary use of Nature was largely determined by his purpose in writing. His poetical thesis received its dogmatic summing-up in the famous dictum,

God made the country and man made the town,[494]

and to the establishment of this thesis nearly all his use of Nature is made more or less directly subservient.