The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature
More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: See Childe Harold.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See Epipsychidion.] too, were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See Tintern Abbey, Ode on Intimations of Immortality, and The Prelude.]
Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from civilization:
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings.
No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality.
Stephen Phillips says of Emily Brontë's poetic gift,
Only barren hills
Could wring the woman riches out of thee,
[Footnote: Emily Brontë.]
and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See The Palace of Art.] and Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See The Poet's Vow; Letters to Robert Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe, An Escape; J. E. Flecker, Dirge; Madison Cawein, Comrading; Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.] he does not have everything his own way.
For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared in London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter of course,
The coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city,
[Footnote: Epistle to George Felton Mathew. Wordsworth's sonnet,
"Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at
this time.]