When we can no longer ramble in the fields of nature, we ramble in the fields of thought and literature. The old become readers. Our heads retain their strength when our legs have become weak.
English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but [not so much of nature herself.] Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.[118] There was need of America. I cannot think of any poetry which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild, the wilde.[119]
Ovid says:—
Nilus in extremum fugit perterritus orbem,
Occuluitque caput, quod adhuc latet.
(Nilus, terrified, fled to the extremity of the globe,
And hid his head, which is still concealed.)
And we moderns must repeat, “Quod adhuc latet.” Phaëton’s epitaph:—
Hic situs est Phaëton, currûs auriga paterni;
Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis.