I.
The first form I shall notice is the expression of that simple, spontaneous, unreflecting pleasure which all unsophisticated beings feel in free open-air life. We all know how children feel when they are let loose to wander at will in green fields, or by a burn-side, or under the budding woods when the primroses and anemones first appear. The full-grown man, too, the man of business or letters, knows how—when his nerves have been over-strung and his heart fretted by worldly things—a day abroad under a blue sky, with a soft southwest blowing, restores and harmonizes him. Old persons, we may have observed, who have seen and suffered much, from whom the world and its interests are receding: what a sense of peace and refreshment comes over them as they gaze in quiet over a distant landscape with the sunlight upon it!
This delight, which children, busy men, and weary age alike find in out-of-door life, may be said to be merely physical, a thing of the nerves and animal spirits. It is so, no doubt, but it is something more. Along with pleasure to the senses, there enters in something more ethereal, not the less real because it may be undefinable. This fresh child-like delight in Nature has found expression abundantly in the poets, especially in those of the early time. Chaucer, before all others, is full of it. As one sample out of many, take this. In the Prologue to “The Legend of Good Women,” he tells that he has such love to the daisy that—
“When comen is the May,
Then in my bed there daweth me no day
That I n’am up and walking in the mead,
To see this flower against the sunné spread,
When it upriseth early in the morrow;
That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow;
So glad am I when that I have presénce
Of it, to doen it all reverence,
As she that is of all flow’rs the flow’r.”
Then he goes on to describe himself kneeling down on the sod to greet the daisy when it first opens:—
“And down on knees anon right I me set,
And as I could this freshé flow’r I grette,
Kneeling always till it unclosed was
Upon the small, and soft, and sweeté gras.”
So we see Chaucer has been beforehand with Burns, not to say Wordsworth, in tender affection for the daisy.
The same transparent expression of delight in the open-air world comes in unexpectedly in some of the old ballads, which are concerned with far other matters. Thus:—
...
“When leaves be large and long
It’s pleasant walking in good greenwood
To hear the small birds’ song.
The woodweel sang and would not cease,
Sitting upon the spray,
So loud he wakened Robin Hood,
In greenwood where he lay.”
Suchlike utterances of ballad-writers and early poets might be multiplied without number. It is a penalty we have to pay for our late and over-stimulated civilization that such direct and unreflecting expressions of gladness in the face of Nature seem hardly any longer possible for a poet. If he will be listened to by our jaded, sophisticated ears, it is not enough for him to utter once again the spontaneous gladness that human hearts feel, and always will feel, in the pleasant air and the sunshine; he must say something about it which shall be novel, and out of the way, something subtle or analytic, or strongly stimulative. And yet it cannot but be that a poet who has a heart keenly sensitive to the common sights of earth and sky, and who describes these with the direct freshness which feeling heart and clear eye always give, may still do much to win back men from over-subtilizing, and to make them feel as if they have never felt before—
“The simple, the sincere delight,
The habitual scene of hill and dale,
The rural herds, the vernal gale,
The tangled vetches’ purple bloom,
The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.”