The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 47

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sion:

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 sh.o.r.e; 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 sh.o.r.e.

(_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 pa.s.sed 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 Sh.e.l.ley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, love of Nature amounted to a pa.s.sion; 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 pa.s.sionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity with the great forms and movements of Nature, Sh.e.l.ley 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 sh.o.r.e 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 gra.s.s, 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 las.h.i.+ng hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pa.s.s 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 Maenad, 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...