Athwart the waves, along thy wake
The garden to the sea will say
(By melancholy fears deprest)--
'The sun already gilds the west,
How very short has been this day.'
There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says:
A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest
Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite.
Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold.
We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: 'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.'