Chaucer was a courtier, and a companion of princes; nay, a reformer also, and a stirrer out in the world. He understood that world, too, thoroughly, in the ordinary sense of such understanding; yet, as he was a true great poet in everything, so in nothing more was he so than in loving the country, and the trees and fields. It is as hard to get him out of a grove as his friend Boccaccio; and he tells us, that, in May, he would often go out into the meadows to “abide” there, solely in order to “look upon the daisy.” Milton seems to have made a point of never living in a house that had not a garden to it.
A certain amount of trusting goodness, surviving twice the worldly knowledge possessed by those who take scorn for superiority, is the general characteristic of men of this stamp, whether of the highest order of that stamp or not. Cowley, Thomson, and Shenstone were such men. Shenstone was deficient in animal spirits, and condescended to be vexed when people did not come to see his retirement; but few men had an acuter discernment of the weak points of others and the general mistakes of mankind, as anybody may see by his Essays; and yet in those Essays he tells us, that he never passed a town or village, without regretting that he could not make the acquaintance of some of the good people that lived there. Thomson’s whole poetry may be said to be pastoral, and everybody knows what a good fellow he was; how beloved by his friends; how social, and yet how sequestered; and how he preferred a house but a floor high at Richmond (for that which is now shown as his, was then a ground-floor only), to one of more imposing dimensions amidst
The smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call London.
Cowley was a partisan, a courtier, a diplomatist; nay, a satirist, and an admirable one, too. See his Cutter of Coleman Street, the gaiety and sharpness of which no one suspects who thinks of him only in the ordinary peacefulness of his reputation; though, doubtless, he would have been the first man to do a practical kindness to any of the Puritans whom he laughed at. His friends the Cavaliers thought he laughed at themselves, in this very comedy; so much more did he gird hypocrisy and pretension in general than in the particular: but Charles the Second said of him after his death, that he had “not left a better man behind him in England.” His partisanship, his politics, his clever satire, his once admired “metaphysical” poetry, as Johnson calls it, nobody any longer cares about; but still, as Pope said,
We love the language of his heart.
He has become a sort of poetical representative of all the love that existed of groves and gardens in those days—of parterres, and orchards, and stately old houses; but above all, of the cottage; a taste for which, as a gentleman’s residence, seems to have originated with him, or at least been first avowed by him; for we can trace it no farther back. “A small house and a large garden” was his aspiration; and he obtained it. Somebody, unfortunately, has got our Cowley’s Essays—we don’t reproach him, for it is a book to keep a good while; but they contain a delightful passage on this subject, which should have been quoted. Take, however, an extract or two from the verses belonging to those Essays. They will conclude this part of our subject well:
Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!
Hail, ye plebeian underwood!
Where the poetic birds rejoice,
And for their quiet nests and plenteous food,
Pay with their grateful voice.
Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying,
Hear the soft winds above me flying,
With all their wanton boughs dispute,
And the more tuneful birds to both replying,
Nor be myself, too, mute.
Ah! wretched and too solitary he,
Who loves not his own company!
He’ll feel the weight of it many a day,
Unless he call in sin or vanity,
To help to bear ’t away.
******
When Epicurus to the world had taught
That Pleasure was the Chiefest Good,
(And was, perhaps, i’ th’ right, if rightly understood,)
His life he to his doctrine brought,
And in a garden’s shade that sovereign pleasure sought.
******
Where does the wisdom and the power divine
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine—
Where do we finer strokes and colours see
Of the Creator’s real poetry,
Than when we with attention look
Upon the third day’s volume of the book?
If we could open and intend our eye,
We all, like Moses, should espy,
Ev’n in a bush, the radiant Deity.
******
Methinks I see great Diocletian walk
In the Salonian garden’s noble shade,
Which by his own imperial hands was made.
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain
To entice him to a throne again.
“If I, my friends,” said he, “should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
’Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
Than ’tis that you should carry me away;
And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,
Than ever, after the most happy fight,
In triumph to the capitol I rode,
To thank the gods, and to be thought, myself, almost a god.”
A noble line that—long and stately as the triumph which it speaks of. Yet the Emperor and the Poet agreed in preferring a walk down an alley of roses. There was nothing so much calculated to rebuke or bewilder them there, as in the faces of their fellow-creatures, even after the “happiest fight.”
