And now, in looking back on these several ways in which poets have handled Nature, two thoughts suggest themselves:—
1. The ways I have noted are far from exhausting all the possible or even actual modes in which poets deal with Nature, or, in other words, in which Nature lends itself to the poet’s service. They are but a few of the most prominent and obvious. It may interest some to look for others, and to add them to the classification here given.
2. Though one mode may be more prominent in one poet, and one in another, yet no poet is limited to only one, or even two, of these several ways of adapting Nature to his purposes. In the works of the greatest poets, those of largest and most varied range, perhaps every one of these modes, and more besides, may be found. To find out and arrange under heads all the ways in which say Shakespeare and Milton deal with Nature, would be an interesting study for any one who is young, and has leisure for it.
With one reflection I close this part of my subject. Any one who has ever been brought to meditate on the relation which the abstractions of mathematics bear to the Laws of Nature must have felt how exceeding wonderful it is. A system of thought evoked out of pure intelligence has been found reflected and, as it were, embodied in the actual movements of the heavenly bodies, and bringing the whole Physical Cosmos within the power of man’s thought—
“From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
From system on to system, without end.”
Such a one, I say, must have been filled with wonder at this marvelous adaptation and correspondence between the mind of transitory man and the vast movements of the most remote and permanent of material things.
A like, though a different, wonder must arise when we reflect how, in the various modes above noted, and no doubt in many more, outward Nature lends itself to be the material in which so many of man’s highest thoughts and emotions can work and embody themselves.
Of the poets and this visible world we may truly say,—
“They took the whole earth for their toy,