“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”
Is there not something still pent up here, still a cud for feeling, still something that the very sounds confine within us unmigratory; something, in the utterance of which we feel no relief of the burthen of feeling? Does it not seem that the southern laborer goes forth into the bright fields, and labors in imitation of Nature’s external beauties, singing his feeling away to the air; whilst the northern man bears his material to his home, and there revolves and fashions his productions from the depth and cunning of his dreamy mind? How warmed by the brightness and harmony of the external world must not Ariosto have been when, in the seventh canto of the “Orlando,” he portrays the exceeding beauty of Alcina, combining all that was most beautiful for eyes to look upon!