The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

Magnificent!
How glorious art thou earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,
Though evil stain its work, and it should be,
Like its creation, weak yet beautiful,
I could fall down and worship that and thee.
Even now my heart adoreth. Wonderful!

What would be our astonishment, if we were to stumble in an ancient poet, upon stanzas like these?

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture; I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean or the stars, mingle and not in vain.

And thus I am absorbed, and this is life!
I look upon the peopled desert past,
As on a place of agony and strife
Where for some sin, to sorrow I was cast.
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.

And when, at length, the mind shall all be free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,—
When elements to elements conform,
And dust is what it should be, shall I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?
The bodiless thought, the spirit of each spot,
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? Shall I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these? and stem
A tide of suffering rather than forego
Such feelings, for the hard and worldly phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turned below,
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts that dare not glow?

To quote all that bears evidence of this wonderful revolution in the very heart of literature would be, not to quote indeed, but to take the whole mass of modern poetry. Powerfully as the spirit of the ancients was attracted by the sublimity of mortal passion and mortal fortunes; by the strife of families and nations, by the strife of emotions in the soul, and the out-bursting of a blasting or a beneficent sublimity in the deeds of men; and magnificent as are the monuments of tragic or heroic grandeur they have erected on this foundation,—so powerfully is the spirit of the moderns drawn, excited, and inflamed by the sublimity of nature, and beautiful and endearing are the strains it has elicited. And whence is this mighty change? Ay, that is the question. Whence is it that the love of Nature has, in the latter ages, become so much more passionate, intense, engrossing, refined, elevated, etherealized? Is it because we see Nature with different eyes? Is it that we see something in it that the classics did not? It is! It is to that omnipotent principle that has so utterly changed the whole system of human philosophy, morals, politics, literature, and social life—the hopes, the fortunes, the reasonings of men, that we owe it. It is to Christianity! The veil which was rent asunder in the hour that its Divine Founder consummated his mission, was plucked away not only from the heart of man, not only from the immortality of his being, but from the face of Nature. A mystery and a doubt which had hung athwart the sky like a vast and gloomy cloud, was withdrawn, and man beheld Creation as the assured work of God: saw a parental hand guiding, sustaining, and embellishing it: and immediately felt himself brought into a near kinship with it, and into an everlasting sympathy with all that was beautiful around him,—not simply for the beauty itself, but because it was the work of the one Great Father—the one Great Fountain of all life and blessing.

The very introduction to the Hebrew literature in the Old Testament, must have produced a deep and delightful change in human feeling. The contrast between the sentiment and the very language of nature, as addressed to man in the literature of the Greeks and that of the Hebrews, was startling, warming and wonderful beyond measure. The beauty of natural objects was no longer a thing apart;—a thing to be admired on its own account; it was allied to a deep sentiment, it became linked to the life of our inner nature. Waters were beheld as the bountiful blessing of Him “who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the field.” They became the emblem of that inward purity of which the noblest pagan could form no adequate conception, but which the God of the Hebrews required. They symbolized many of the evils, as well as the refreshments of life. Now they typified, “brethren that deal deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks that pass away; which are brackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid:” now, they were as the billows of affliction,—scenes of trouble—“all thy billows have gone over me:” and now they were as the refreshment of a thirsty soul. The greenness of the grass and of the branch pointed to the beauty, the fleeting beauty of life; and now to the insecure prosperity of the unjust:—“He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden; his roots are wrapped about the heap, and he seeth the place of stones. If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying I have not seen him. Behold this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow.”

Every thing in nature, the flower—the wind—the spider’s web—darkness and light—calm and tempest—drought and flood—the shadow and the noon-day heat—a great rock in a weary land—every thing about us, and above us, acquired in this splendid and inimitable literature, a new and touching meaning; a meaning bound up with our lives; a worth coeval with our highest hopes, or most fervent desires. Every thing became a moral and a warning. They were made to illustrate not only the operations of providence, but to cast a new light upon our intellectual being. They did not, indeed, speak out as to the exact value stamped upon man by the Deity, but they gave intimations more profound and startling than anything in the whole round of pagan philosophy. And then, there was an undertone of sorrow, a voice of plaintive regret over man—a delicacy and tenderness of phrase that wonderfully attracted and endeared. What ineffable melancholy is there in these following sentiments! What an intense longing after life, and yet, what a longing for death! What a vivid feeling of the grinding evils of mortal being; and what images of the fulness of peace in the grave!—“Why died I not from the womb? For now should I have lain still, and been quiet; I should have slept: then had I been at rest. With kings and counsellors of the earth, which had built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or, as a hidden, untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw the light. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and the great is there; and the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery; and life unto the bitter in soul? Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures? Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?” Job iii. 11-22.

But this new alliance with nature; this new and spiritual beauty cast upon every thing, was not all. The magnificence of Creation and its phenomena were made tenfold conspicuous; and still beyond this, men were no longer left to suppose, or even to contend that the world was the workmanship of Deity. They were no longer left to bewilder themselves amongst a host of imaginary gods,—the universe in its majesty, and God—the one sublime and eternal founder and preserver of it, were flashed upon the spiritual vision in the broadest and brightest light. Here was seen the clear and continuous history of Creation:—God, the sole and immortal, sate upon the circle of the world, and its inhabitants were as grashoppers before him. The sun, moon, and stars were of his ordaining and appointing; night and day, times and seasons, revolved before him; his were the cattle on a thousand hills; his all the swarming tribes of humanity. The prophetic writings proclaimed his deity, his power and attributes, in language unparalleled in splendour, and with imagery which embraced all that is glorious, resplendent, beautiful and soothing, or dark, desolate and withering, in nature.