Such was the effect of the Old Testament;—and then came the New!—then came Christ! The Old shewed us the Deity in unspeakable majesty;—his creation as beautiful and sublime;—Christ proclaimed him the Father of Men; and in those words poured on earth a new light. The words which guaranteed the eternity of our spirits, chased a dimness from the sky which had hung there from the days of Adam: they rent down the curtains of death and oblivion, and let fall upon earth such a tide of sunshine as never warmed it till then. The atmosphere of heaven gushed down to earth. From that hour a new and inextinguishable interest was given us in nature. It was the work of our Father: it was the birthplace of millions of everlasting souls. Its hills and valleys then smiled in an ethereal beauty, for they were then to our eyes spread out by a mighty and tender parent for our happy abodes. The waters ran with a voice of gladness; the clouds sailed over us with a new aspect of delight; the wind blew, and the leaves fluttered in it, and whispered everywhere of life—eternal consciousness—eternal enjoyment of intellect and of love. Through all things we felt a portion of the divine, paternal Spirit diffused, and “the wilderness and the solitary place” thenceforth had a language for our hearts full of the holy peace and the revelations of eternity. Then the musing poet felt, what it has been reserved for one in our day only fully to express:—
A presence that disturbed him with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore is he still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth: of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of his purest thoughts; the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of his heart, and soul
Of all his moral being.
Thus, then, is dissipated the mystery of the more intense love of Nature evinced by the moderns than the ancients. It is but part of that gift of divine revelation which has endowed us with so many other advantages over those grand old philosophers of antiquity, who in the depths of their hearts, darkened and abused by many an hereditary superstition, yet found some of the unquenched embers of that fire of love and knowledge originally kindled there by the Creator, and cherished and fanned them into a noble flame. Had they heard from heaven these living words pronounced—God is Love!—had they seen the great ladder of revelation reared from earth to heaven, and been permitted to trace every radiant step by which man is allowed to ascend from these lower regions into the blaze of God’s own paradise, their spirits would have kindled into as intense a glow as ours, and their vision have become as conscious of surrounding glories. God is Love! These are words of miraculous power. Once assured that the very principle and source of all life is love, and that it is destined to cast its beams on our heads through eternal ages, we become filled with a felicity beyond the power of earthly evil. All those intimations that creation itself had given us, are confirmed. We feel the influence of the great principle of beneficence in the joy of our own being; in the cheerfulness of surrounding humanity; in the voices and songs of happy creatures; in the face of earth, and the lights of heaven. Seas, mountains, and forests, all become imbued with beauty as they are contemplated in love; and their aspects and their sounds fill us with sensations of happiness. When we read in the Phædon of Plato, the few and feeble grounds, as they now appear to us, on which that good old Socrates raised his arguments for the immortality of the soul; when we hear his exultation on discovering in Anaxagoras the principle laid down, that “the divine intellect was the cause of all beings,” we feel with what deep transport he would have witnessed the gates of eternity set wide by the Divine hand; and in what hues of heaven the very circumstance would have invested all about him. Yes! the only difference between modern literature and that of the ancients, lies in our grand advantage over them in this particular. It is from the literature of the Bible, and the heirship of immortality laid open to us in it, that we owe our enlarged conceptions of natural beauty, and our quickened affections towards the handiworks of God. We walk about the world as its true heirs, and heirs of far more than it has to give. We walk about in confidence, in love, and in peaceful hope; for we know that we are the rightful sons of the house; and that neither death nor distance can interrupt our progress towards the home-paradise of the Divine Father.
CHAPTER II.
THE PRE-EMINENCE OF THE LOVE OF NATURE IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE OVER THAT OF ALL OTHER MODERN NATIONS—THE PROMOTION OF THIS PASSION BY THE WRITINGS OF PROFESSOR WILSON, IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE; AND BY THE WOOD-CUTS OF BEWICK—MEANS OF STILL FURTHER ENCOURAGING IT.
In the former chapter I have endeavoured to point out the existence of a striking difference as it regards the love of nature between the classical and modern literature, and to explain, and I hope successfully, the principal causes of it. But it is not the less true, that almost as great a difference exists in this same respect between our British literature, and that of almost all other modern nations. I do not intend to go about very laboriously to attempt to prove this fact, for I think it stands sufficiently self-evident on the face of all modern literature. In science, in art, in history; philosophy, natural and moral; in theological, philological and classical inquiries, the continental nations have attained the highest honours. In biography the French are unrivalled; in autobiography the Germans are equally so. In some species of poetry the Germans contest the palm with us; in mathematical industry, and historical research, they are greatly our superiors; but with the solitary exceptions of Gesner, Sturm, and St. Pierre, where have they any writers to range with our Evelyns, Whites, and Waltons? or poets, with our Thomsons and Bloomfields? or indeed, with the whole series of our poets who do not professedly write on the country, but are irresistibly led to it; and from whom the love of it breaks out on all occasions? In the French, the social feeling is the most strongly developed; in the Italian, passion and fancy; in the German, the metaphysical. The Germans, indeed, most strongly resemble the English in their literary tastes. There seems to be a fellow-feeling between them, resulting from ancient kinship. They have a similar character of simplicity; they are alike grave, solid, and domestic, and prone to deep and melancholy thought. They have a love of nature deep as ours, for the tone of their minds makes them, in every thing they do attach themselves to, earnest and enthusiastic. In every thing relating to the affections, their literature is unrivalled; their feelings are profound, tender, and spiritual; and while a false and superficial taste has made rapid strides amongst us of late years—a taste for glitter, shew, and fashion, the natural accompaniment of wealth and luxury, a growing fondness for German literature must be hailed as a good omen; as likely to give a new infusion of heart and mind to our writings; to re-awaken our love for the simple, the domestic—the fireside love; in fact, to bring us back to what was the ancient character of the English; high-toned in morals, simple in manners, manly and affectionate in heart. Their love of nature is as deep as ours; but it is not so equally and extensively diffused. The solemn and speculative cast of their genius has tended to link it with the gloom of forests and tempests, and with the wild fictions of the supernatural, rather than to scatter it over every cheerful field, and cause it to brood over every sunny cottage-garden, amid the odour of flowers and the hum of bees. There is something wonderfully attractive in their descriptions of the old-fashioned homeliness of their rural and domestic manners; in the unbustling quietness of their lives, and in the holy strength of their family attachments. Such writings as that Idyl of Voss, describing the manner of life of the venerable pastor of Grenau, the autobiographies of Goethe and Stilling, seem to carry us back into the simple ages of our own country. That which characterised them, seems to be preserved to the present hour in Germany; and then, the affectionate intellectuality of their minds, and their very language, so homely and yet so expressive, cause them to abound in such touches of natural pathos as are nowhere else to be found. Yet, when their love of nature exhibits itself in descriptions of country life, amid all these charms, we are often tempted to exclaim with the pastor’s wife in Voss, when in a pic-nic party they discovered, while taking tea under the forest trees, that they had forgotten the tea-spoons, and had to substitute pieces of stick for them—“O, dear nature, thou art almost too natural!”
But the aspect of the different countries is sufficiently indicative of the natural feeling. Instead of the solitary chateau, or baronial castle, amid dark forests, or wide unfenced plains; instead of the great landed proprietors crowding into large towns, and the very labourers huddling themselves into villages, and going, as they do, in some parts of France, seven or eight miles on asses to their daily work in the fields, the hills and valleys of England are studded all over with the dwellings of the landed gentry, and the cottages of their husbandmen. Villas amid shrubberies and gardens; villages environed with old-fashioned crofts; farm-houses and cottages, singly or in groups—a continuous chain of cultivation and rustic residences stretches from end to end and side to side of the island. Our wealthy aristocrats have caught a fatal passion for burying themselves in the capital in a perpetual turmoil of political agitations, ostentatious rivalry, and dissipation—a passion fatal to their own happiness and to the whole character of their minds; but the love of the country is yet strong enough in large classes to maintain our pre-eminence in this respect. The testimony of foreigners, however, is stronger than our own; and foreigners are always struck with the garden-like aspect of England; and the charms of our country houses. A number of a French literary paper, “Le Panorama de Londres,” has fallen accidentally into my hands, while writing this, which contains an article—De la Poesie Anglaise et de la Poesie Allemande—from which I transcribe the following passages.
“England has produced her great epic poet, her great dramatic poet; and the last age gave her reasoning poets in abundance. The time for the one and the other is past. By a revolution, the causes of which it would be difficult to trace, her poetry has changed both its character and object; and strange enough, under the reign of a civilization the most advanced, her poetry has returned to nature. At first, the fact strikes us as an unaccountable anomaly; for what country owes so much to art as England? The very aspect of the country shews everywhere the hand of man. A scientific culture has changed its whole face. The forests have ceased to be impenetrable; the rivers to be wild torrents; the mountains themselves to be savage. Human industry has appropriated every thing; fire, air, earth, every thing is subjected, every thing is tamed. The very animals seem to submit themselves voluntarily to the service of man. The horse himself, the English horse, so swift and powerful, scarcely neighs with impatience, or capers with eagerness; his very impetuosity is docile. The Englishman is in one sense the king of the world. It is for him that every thing is in motion around him: yet he himself is bound by unchangeable customs. He fears change. He has even a religion of an established order. One would think nothing could be more prosaic than a country thus laboured; yet, nevertheless, all Europe resounds with the songs of her poets. Amid the miracles of industry, the profusion of riches, the refinement of luxury; in the face of steam-engines, suspension bridges, and railroads, imagination has lost nothing of its ancient empire; on the contrary, during the last thirty years, she has acquired more; she has been borne, as by an irresistible influence, towards the description of natural objects and simple sentiments. She has revelled in the charms of a poetry whose freshness seemed to belong to another age. The fact is, if we regard England more attentively, we shall discover her under a different aspect to what has been usually ascribed to her; and shall be less astonished to find her poetic in seeing her picturesque. That agriculture, so marvellous, is far from having given up every thing to the useful; its object seems rather to have been to embellish than to fertilize the earth. Those fields so well tilled, are green and riant; those quiet streams flow brimful through rich meadows; and, thanks to beautiful trees and living hedges, the very plains are charming. Those seats where opulence parades all its splendour, are environed by greensward pastured by abundant cattle; and the art which designs those immense parks, seems to have no object but to put into a frame a beautiful landscape. The taste is no longer to dig lakes, to cast up mounts, to plant thickets; but to inclose whole rivers, woods, and mountains. Everywhere you discover the sentiment of the beauty of nature. You find it in every class. Neither riches nor poverty have been able to extinguish it. We observe in other countries that the sentiment is unknown to the peasantry. They are the towns which they admire: to them the country is merely useful. But in England everybody loves the country; even those who cultivate it. The most humble cottage is a proof of it. The taste which rarely distinguishes the architecture of the English towns, is reserved, I think, for the country houses. The little gardens which lead to them; the orchards which surround them; even the very bushes of jessamine or of rose, which crown their porches or tapestry their walls, seem designed to delight the eye. Amid the treasures of an admirable vegetation—gothic ruins, the towers of an old manor, the arches of an abbey, the ivy which clothes the walls of a parish church; the tree scathed and decaying, which has no value but its age; all these things are respected by every one as the monuments of the past, or the ornaments of the country. The whole population interests itself in every thing which adorns its abode; and this nation, the queen of commerce and industry, seems to recollect with affection, that it is to the earth that she owes her wealth, her glory, and her greatness.
“An analogous sentiment pervades the poetry of the English. The verses of their good poets seem to have been composed in the open air; all external objects are by them faithfully portrayed; the impressions they produce are faithfully rendered. Simple sentiments, those of a domestic nature, so well protected by a country life, in them preserve all their force and all their purity. Their recitals are often the most touching and familiar; when they turn upon great adventures, they are related as they would be on a winter’s evening before the fire of an ancient castle, or of a humble cottage. Scarcely an English poet is wanting in descriptive talent, not even the least celebrated amongst them. It shines with great eclat in Burns, in Crabbe, in Walter Scott. Lord Byron, who has so many others, possesses none perhaps in a greater degree than this.”