Whilst lightly flew the steeds, nor ’neath the car
The burnished axle moistened with the brine:—
Thus tow’rd the fleet his coursers bore the god.”
Here we have, half-physical, half-mythological, like Milton’s half-created lion, the fore part perfect, the hinder part still clay, a well-known natural appearance. After the storm-winds are laid, but while the sea still feels their power, it is thus that the high-crested breakers may be seen racing shorewards with their white manes backward streaming, and glorified with rainbow hues from a bright dawn or a splendid sunset poured upon them from the land.
But for the most part, even Homer, early poet though he was, has quite forgotten that original aspect of Nature out of which each god was shaped, and has invested them with entirely human attributes, even with human follies and vices, which have no connection at all with the primary fact, but are the wildest freaks of extravagant fancy. If then even Homer has so much forgotten the physical origin of his mythic gods, how must it be with the tragic poets! Æschylus and Sophocles we see have entirely put aside the immoral fables about them, and are anxious to find the truth which lies at the root of the popular belief, and to moralize the whole conception of the gods. When we come down to the Latin poets, we do not find even this effort; but the gods they have borrowed from Greece are used as mere poetic machines, with as little of either physical or moral meaning as a modern romance-writer might use fairies, gnomes, or hobgoblins.
Although in the more imaginative of modern poets, modes of conceiving Nature, and expressions every here and there crop out, which in an earlier age would certainly have flowered into mythology, it is nevertheless true that, ever since the literary age set in, poets in general have viewed Nature with a more familiar eye, and described it in language which ordinary speech would not disown. I shall now endeavor to classify the several ways in which Nature is dealt with by the poets, the several aspects of it which enter most prominently into Poetry. It will be enough for my present purpose merely to generalize, under a few heads, the most obvious of these forms, without attempting to analyze them or to account for them.
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,