How earnest is Wordsworth as he opens out glimpses of unknown modes of being in his address to the Brook:
"If wish were mine some type of thee to view
Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do
Like Grecian artists, give the human cheeks
Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,—
Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs;
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
And hath bestowed on thee a safer good;
Unwearied joy, and life without its care."
Again, what natural feeling declares itself in the delightful Spanish poem translated by Longfellow:
"Laugh of the mountain! lyre of bird and tree!
Pomp of the meadow! mirror of the morn!
The soul of April, unto whom are born
The rose and jessamine, leaps wild in thee!"
How deep, once more, the note sounded by Brown in his lines on "The Well":
"I am a spring—
Why square me with a kerb?
. . .
O cruel force,
That gives me not a chance
To fill my natural course;
With mathematic rod
Economising God;
Calling me to pre-ordered circumstance
Nor suffering me to dance
Over the pleasant gravel,
With music solacing my travel—
With music, and the baby buds that toss
In light, with roots and sippets of the moss!"
The longing for freedom to expand the dimly realised and mystic elements in his soul-life was stirred within him by the joyous bubbling of a spring. To kerb the artless, natural flow is to "economise God"—so the limitations and restrictions of the life that now is artificialise and deaden the divine within us. There is more than metaphor in such a comparison; there is the linkage of the immanent idea. His emotion culminates in the concluding lines:
"One faith remains—
That through what ducts soe'er,
What metamorphic strains,
What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass
To where, O God,
Thou lov'st to mass
Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere.
So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills,
Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills."
There are indeed but few with any feeling for nature who have not been moved to special trains of thought, the outcome of characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to the men of old, the running stream will sing of the soul in nature.