For coast scenery the description of Dover cliffs stands almost alone.
But while with the forest and the sea-coast Shakespeare’s early life had made him familiar, he had not, as far as we know, had much, if any, experience of mountains. Of Nature, as of man, he painted for the most part what he had seen and known—idealizing it of course, but having caught the first hint from reality. And mountains formed no part of the Warwickshire or indeed of the England which he knew. Therefore while we find many notices of the fields, the forest, and the sea, and of the way they affect human imaginations, there is no allusion to the effect of mountain scenery. It could not have been said of him:—
“The power of hills is on thee.”
On this fact Mr Ruskin has this characteristic reflection, that Shakespeare having been ordained to take a full view of total human nature, to be perfectly equal and universal in his portraiture of man, could be allowed no mountains, nor even supreme natural beauty. For had he been reared among mountains they would have overbalanced him, have laid too powerful a grasp on his imagination, have made him lean too much their way, and so would have marred his universality. Whether we take this view of it or not, it is certain that the power of the mountains is not expressed in that poetry which expresses almost every other conceivable thing, and that the mountain rapture had to lie dumb for two more centuries before it found utterance in English song.
In “Cymbeline” the two noble youths are brought up in caves among the mountains, but from this their characters receive no touch of freedom or grandeur, but are enhanced only by having taken no taint of degradation from so base a dwelling-place. “The only thing belonging to the hills,” says Mr. Ruskin, “that Shakespeare seems to feel as noble, was the pine-tree, and that was because he had seen in Warwickshire clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone mounds above the lowland woods.” He touches on this tree fondly again and again.
“As rough
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,
That by his top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to the vale.”
Again:—