Ye sacred Muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired—
Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear—
Would you your poet’s first petition hear;
Give me the way of wandering stars to know,
The depths of heaven above, and earth below.
****
But if my heavy blood restrain the flight
Of my free soul, aspiring to the height
Of nature, and unclouded fields of light—
My next desire is, void of care and strife,
To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life—
A country cottage near a crystal flood,
A winding valley, and a lofty wood.
Some god conduct me to the sacred shades
Where Bacchanals are sung by Spartan maids;
Or lift me high to Hemus’ hilly crown,
Or in the plains of Tempe lay me down,
Or lead me to some solitary place,
And cover my retreat from human race.
Turn now to the modern world of literature; and what a blaze of light, what a warmth, what a spirit, what a passion bursts upon us! We step, indeed, into a new world. All here is glowing, clear in view, tender in feeling; full of a new, profound, popular, and yet domestic sentiment—a sentiment befitting “the large utterance of the early gods,” and yet hallowing and making more brotherly the bosoms of men. We are, in fact, as far advanced beyond the ancients in our knowledge of nature, as we are in that of “the life and immortality brought to light by the gospel.” With all the admiration of the ancients for the loveliness of nature, with all their enjoyment of its amenities, what is there in them like the hungering and thirsting, the yearning after her, of such hearts as those of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and a thousand other lights of modern literature? The mighty difference is, indeed, most strikingly manifested by comparing Longinus and Burke. The Palmyrian secretary, amongst his five sources of the sublime, does not even include the influence of natural objects. His treatise is, indeed, more truly a treatise on writing strongly and elegantly, than on the sublime. Like the poets, he perceives the amenities of the country; but there is only one passage in his whole work in which he speaks out plainly of the sublimity of external nature. “The impulse of nature inclines to admire not a little transparent rivulet that ministers to our necessities; but the Nile, the Ister, the Rhine, or still more, the Ocean. We are never surprised at the sight of a small fire that burns clearly, and blazes out on our private hearth; but view with amaze the celestial fires, though they are often obscured by vapours and eclipses. Nor do we reckon anything in nature more wonderful than the boiling furnaces of Etna, which cast out stones, and sometimes whole rocks from their labouring abyss, and pour out whole rivers of liquid and unmingled flame.”
See how Burke has expanded and worked out this glimpse of the true view. He is full of the mighty influence of Nature’s sublime features. Her heights and depths, her horrors and glooms, the demonstrations of her power and grandeur in storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Infinity and Eternity are all before him in their awful majesty, and furnish him with some of his deepest sources and most splendid illustrations of the sublime.
But the fact must be evident to every one. A single glance from the ancients to the moderns, and what a contrast! Throughout all the writings of the most enthusiastic ancients, where are the burning, passionate longings after nature that are transfused through all our modern literature? Nature is not with us a thing incidentally alluded to,—a thing to be voluptuously enjoyed when we find ourselves in the flowery lap of May; ours is a living, permeating, perpetual affection. We seek after communion with her as one of the highest enjoyments of our existence; we seek it to soothe the ruffling of our spirits; to calm our world-vexed hearts; to fill us with the divine presence and overshadowing of beauty. The love of her is with us a daily attraction; the knowledge of her a daily pursuit; we have advanced her cognizance and admiration into a science. Our naturalists feel the breathings of a celestial spirit come from her secret shrines, even while they are seeking after and arranging her lesser forms and productions. Our romance writers dip their pens in her hues to cast a fascination upon their narratives; and our travellers climb every mountain, traverse every sea, explore every distant region, to catch fresh glimpses of her beauty. True, many of these may not, and do not, feel all the attachment they profess—there are thousands who do but affect it, as they do any other fashion; but their very imitation, and their very number, do homage to the great worship of the age.
But it is through our poetry that the admiration of nature is diffused as one great soul. From Chaucer to the most recent poet, it is the universal spirit. It would seem a contradiction now, to say that a man is a poet, but that he has no ardent feeling for nature. In fact, a new language, a new kind of inspiration, distinguish the modern poets from the ancients altogether. Great as each may respectively be, their object, their vision, and their tone in this particular, are widely opposed. When do we find one of the classical writers, speaking thus of his youth?
Like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then,
To me was all in all—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed of the eye.
Wordsworth.
We should be startled to hear an ancient exclaim, like Shelley: