The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

That Homer had an eye for the sublime features of earth, the nobler forms of animal life, and phenomena of nature,—his bold and beautiful similes, scattered all through the Iliad, of storms, of overflowing rivers, of forests on flame, of the lion, the horse, and others, sufficiently testify; that he had a most exquisite sense of the picturesque, is shewn in almost every page of the Odyssey; in the cave of Polypheme; in good old king Laertes occupied in his farm; and in the whole episode of Ulysses at the lodge of Eumeus, the goatherd. But yet it is, after all, only in contemplating some scene of delicious rural beauty, something akin to Arcadian sweetness, that he breaks out into anything like a rapture. The abode of Calypso, as seen by Hermes on his approach to it, is an exact instance.

Then, swift ascending from the azure wave,
He took the path that winded to the cave.
Large was the grot in which the nymph he found,
The fair-haired nymph, with every beauty crowned.
She sate and sung; the rocks resound the lays;
The cave was brightened with the rising blaze;
Cedar and frankincense, an odorous pile,
Flamed on the hearth, and wide perfumed the isle,
While she with work and song the time divides,
And through the loom the golden shuttle guides.
Without the grot a various sylvan scene
Appeared around, and groves of living green;
Poplars and alders, ever quivering, played,
And nodding cypress formed a grateful shade;
On whose high branches, waving with the storm,
The birds of broadest wing their mansion form;
The chough, the sea-mew, and loquacious crow,
And scream aloft, and skim the deeps below.
Depending vines the delving caverns screen,
With purple clusters blushing through the green.
Four limpid fountains from the clefts distil;
And every fountain forms a separate rill,
In mazy, winding wanderings down the hill:
Where bloomy meads with vivid greens were crowned,
And glowing violets threw odours round—
A scene, where if a god should cast his sight,
A god might gaze and wander with delight!
Joy touched the messenger of heaven; he stayed
Entranced, and all the blissful haunt surveyed.

Odyssey, B. v.

In Hesiod, the perception of even the delights of the summer field were far fainter. Though he fed his flock at the foot of Mount Helicon, he has little to say in praise of its aspect; and though he gives you great insight into the state of agriculture, and the simple mode of life of the country people, a very few verses furnish almost all the praise of nature which he had to bestow. His mind seemed occupied in tracing the genealogy of the gods, and framing grave maxims for the regulation of human conduct.

Of all the Greek writers, Theocritus is the one that luxuriates most in natural beauty. His sense of the picturesque is keen, and his penciling of such subjects is most vigorous and graphic. His two fishermen remind us of Crabbe; nothing can be more exquisite.

Two ancient fishers in a straw-thatched shed—
Leaves were their walls, and sea-weed was their bed,
Reclined their weary limbs; hard by were laid
Baskets and all their implements of trade;
Rods, hooks, and lines composed of stout horse-hairs,
And nets of various sorts, and various snares,
The seine, the cast-net, and the wicker maze,
To waste the watery tribe a thousand ways;
A crazy boat was drawn upon a plank;
Mats were their pillow, wove of osiers dank;
Skins, caps, and coats, a rugged covering made;
This was their wealth, their labour and their trade.
No pot to boil, no watch-dog to defend,
Yet blessed they lived with penury their friend;
None visited their shed, save, every tide,
The wanton waves that washed its tottering side.

Idyl. xxi.

Then again, nothing can be more picturesque, nothing more boldly graphic and solemnly poetical, than the situation in which he makes Castor and Pollux find Anycus, the king of Bebrycia; nothing more striking than the image of that chief.

Meanwhile, the royal brothers devious strayed
Far from the shore, and sought the cooling shade.
Hard by, a hill with waving forests crowned,
Their eyes attracted; in the dale they found
A spring perennial in a rocky cave:
Full to the margin flowed the lucid wave;
Below small fountains gushed, and murmuring near,
Sparkled like silver, and as silver clear.
Above, tall pines and poplars quivering played,
And planes and cypress in dark greens arrayed;
Around balm-breathing flowers of every hue,
The bees’ ambrosia, in the meadows grew.
There sate a chief, tremendous to the eye,
His couch the rock, his canopy the sky;
The gauntlet’s strokes his cheeks and ears around,
Had marked his face with many a desperate wound.
Round as a globe, and prominent his chest,
Broad was his back, but broader was his breast;
Firm was his flesh, with iron sinews fraught,
Like some Colossus on an anvil wrought.

Id. xxii.