And where the flowers burn with glow of Love,
It is the rose that shews the brightest flame,
For is the rose not of all flowers the queen,
The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth?
Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, and feeling for Nature was entirely absent.
[CHAPTER IX]
SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE
It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[[1]]
The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with me--'tis your duty.'
Then the Spring greetings: