Lectures on the English Poets Part 9

Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion through this and the following cantos? For instance, the very next pa.s.sage is crowded with a set of striking images.

"And see where surly Winter pa.s.ses off Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts: His blasts obey, and quit the howling hill, The shatter'd forest, and the ravag'd vale; While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost, The mountains lift their green heads to the sky.

As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed, And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze, Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets Deform the day delightless; so that scarce The bittern knows his time with bill ingulpht To shake the sounding marsh, or from the sh.o.r.e The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath, And sing their wild notes to the list'ning waste."

Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets: for he gives most of the poetry of natural description. Others have been quite equal to him, or have surpa.s.sed him, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque part of his art, in marking the peculiar features and curious details of objects;--no one has yet come up to him in giving the sum total of their effects, their varying influences on the mind. He does not go into the _minutiae_ of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the same unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions is seen growing around us, fresh and l.u.s.ty as in itself. We feel the effect of the atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heat or cold, the glow of summer, the gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone.

We hear the snow drifting against the broken cas.e.m.e.nt without, and see the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm resounds through the leafless groves. In a word, he describes not to the eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul. His faults were those of his style--of the author and the man; but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings were bedded, were too much for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation, or false ornaments. It is for this reason that he is, perhaps, the most popular of all our poets, treating of a subject that all can understand, and in a way that is interesting to all alike, to the ignorant or the refined, because he gives back the impression which the things themselves make upon us in nature. "That," said a man of genius, seeing a little shabby soiled copy of Thomson's Seasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure country alehouse--"That is true fame!"

It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolence is Thomson's best poem; but that is not the case. He has in it, indeed, poured out the whole soul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine, dissolved into a voluptuous dream; and surrounded himself with a set of objects and companions, in entire unison with the listlessness of his own temper. Nothing can well go beyond the descriptions of these inmates of the place, and their luxurious pampered way of life--of him who came among them like "a burnished fly in month of June," but soon left them on his heedless way; and him,

"For whom the merry bells had rung, I ween, If in this nook of quiet, bells had ever been."

The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where "all was one full-swelling bed"; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by "the stock-dove's plaint amid the forest deep,"

"That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale"--

are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no pa.s.sages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy, equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our ships at Carthagena--"of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves," and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the deserts of Arabia. This last pa.s.sage, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed.

"------Breath'd hot From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide-glitt'ring waste of burning sand, A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Son of the desert, ev'n the camel feels Shot through his wither'd heart the fiery blast.

Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands, Commov'd around, in gath'ring eddies play; Nearer and nearer still they dark'ning come, Till with the gen'ral all-involving storm Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise, And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown, Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep, Beneath descending hills the caravan Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets, Th' impatient merchant, wond'ring, waits in vain; And Mecca saddens at the long delay."

There are other pa.s.sages of equal beauty with these; such as that of the hunted stag, followed by "the inhuman rout,"

"------That from the shady depth Expel him, circling through his ev'ry shift.

He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing sees The glades mild op'ning to the golden day, Where in kind contest with his b.u.t.ting friends He wont to struggle, or his loves enjoy."

The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early a.s.sociations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer. Any thing more beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the whole range of poetry.

"There through the prison of unbounded wilds, Barr'd by the hand of nature from escape, Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around Strikes his sad eye but deserts lost in snow, And heavy-loaded groves, and solid floods, That stretch athwart the solitary vast Their icy horrors to the frozen main; And cheerless towns far distant, never bless'd, Save when its annual course the caravan Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay, With news of human kind."

The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart, was never more finely expressed than it is here.

The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night--of the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the return of spring in Lapland--

"Where pure Niemi's fairy mountains rise, And fring'd with roses Tenglio rolls his stream,"

is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller lost in the snow, is a well-known and admirable dramatic episode. I prefer, however, giving one example of our author's skill in painting common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison with the style of some later writers on such subjects. It is of little consequence what pa.s.sage we take. The following description of the first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasing as any.

"Through the hush'd air the whitening shower descends, At first thin wav'ring, till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the day With a continual flow. The cherish'd fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white: 'Tis brightness all, save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current. Low the woods Bow their h.o.a.r head; and ere the languid Sun, Faint, from the West emits his ev'ning ray, Earth's universal face, deep hid, and chill, Is one wide dazzling waste, that buries wide The works of man. Drooping, the lab'rer-ox Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heav'n, Tam'd by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence a.s.signs them. One alone, The red-breast, sacred to the household G.o.ds, Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky, In joyless fields and th.o.r.n.y thickets leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights On the warm hearth; then hopping o'er the floor, Eyes all the smiling family askance, And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is: Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare, Though timorous of heart, and hard beset By death in various forms, dark snares and dogs, And more unpitying men, the garden seeks, Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kind [sic]

Eye the bleak heav'n, and next, the glist'ning earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers'd, Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

It is thus that Thomson always gives a _moral sense_ to nature.

Thomson's blank verse is not harsh, or utterly untuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill. The selections which have been made from his works in Enfield's Speaker, and other books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius or taste; such as Palemon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and Amelia. Those parts of any author which are most liable to be st.i.tched in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best.

The moral descriptions and reflections in the Seasons are in an admirable spirit, and written with great force and fervour.

His poem on Liberty is not equally good: his Muse was too easy and good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the const.i.tutional monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was but an indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is the soul of patriotism, and of public good: but you would not expect a man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his waistcoat pockets, to be "overrun with the spleen," or to heat himself needlessly about an abstract proposition.

His plays are liable to the same objection. They are never acted, and seldom read. The author could not, or would not, put himself out of his way, to enter into the situations and pa.s.sions of others, particularly of a tragic kind. The subject of Tancred and Sigismunda, which is taken from a serious episode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorly handled: the ground may be considered as still unoccupied.

Cowper, whom I shall speak of in this connection, lived at a considerable distance of time after Thomson; and had some advantages over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and leisurely choice of such topics only as his genius and peculiar habits of mind prompted him to treat of. The Task has fewer blemishes than the Seasons; but it has not the same capital excellence, the "unbought grace" of poetry, the power of moving and infusing the warmth of the author's mind into that of the reader. If Cowper had a more polished taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject.

If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events; in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please himself than the public. There is an effeminacy about him, which shrinks from and repels common and hearty sympathy. With all his boasted simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general descriptions of nature: he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any untoward accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads "his Vashti"

forth to public view with a look of consciousness and attention to etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the tea-kettle--No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn. His walks and arbours are kept clear of worms and snails, with as much an appearance of _pet.i.t-maitreship_ as of humanity. He has some of the sickly sensibility and pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope prided himself in them: whereas, Cowper affects to be all simplicity and plainness. He had neither Thomson's love of the unadorned beauties of nature, nor Pope's exquisite sense of the elegances of art. He was, in fact, a nervous man, afraid of trusting himself to the seductions of the one, and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to an intimacy with the other: but to be a coward, is not the way to succeed either in poetry, in war, or in love! Still he is a genuine poet, and deserves all his reputation. His worst vices are amiable weaknesses, elegant trifling. Though there is a frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness in his manner, he has left a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself. Such, among others, are his memorable description of the post coming in, that of the preparations for tea in a winter's evening in the country, of the unexpected fall of snow, of the frosty morning (with the fine satirical transition to the Empress of Russia's palace of ice), and most of all, the winter's walk at noon. Every one of these may be considered as distinct studies, or highly finished cabinet-pieces, arranged without order or coherence. I shall be excused for giving the last of them, as what has always appeared to me one of the most feeling, elegant, and perfect specimens of this writer's manner.

"The night was winter in his roughest mood; The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon Upon the southern side of the slant hills, And where the woods fence off the northern blast, The season smiles, resigning all its rage, And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue, Without a cloud, and white without a speck The dazzling splendour of the scene below.

Again the harmony comes o'er the vale; And through the trees I view th' embattled tow'r, Whence all the music. I again perceive The soothing influence of the wafted strains, And settle in soft musings as I tread The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms, Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.

The roof, though moveable through all its length, As the wind sways it, has yet well suffic'd, And, intercepting in their silent fall The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.

No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.

The redbreast warbles still, but is content With slender notes, and more than half suppress'd.

Pleas'd with his solitude, and flitting light From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes From many a twig the pendent drop of ice, That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below.

Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft, Charms more than silence. Meditation here May think down hours to moments. Here the heart May give a useful lesson to the head, And Learning wiser grow without his books.

Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one, Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells, By which the magic art of shrewder wits Holds an unthinking mult.i.tude enthrall'd.

Some to the fascination of a name Surrender judgment hood-wink'd. Some the style Infatuates, and through labyrinths and wilds Of error leads them, by a tune entranc'd.

While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear The insupportable fatigue of thought, And swallowing therefore without pause or choice The total grist unsifted, husks and all.

But trees, and rivulets whose rapid course Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer, And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs, And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root, Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth, Not shy, as in the world, and to be won By slow solicitation, seize at once The roving thought, and fix it on themselves."

His satire is also excellent. It is pointed and forcible, with the polished manners of the gentleman, and the honest indignation of the virtuous man. His religious poetry, except where it takes a tincture of controversial heat, wants elevation and fire. His Muse had not a seraph's wing. I might refer, in ill.u.s.tration of this opinion, to the laboured antic.i.p.ation of the Millennium at the end of the sixth book. He could describe a piece of sh.e.l.l-work as well as any modern poet: but he could not describe the New Jerusalem so well as John Bunyan;--nor are his verses on Alexander Selkirk so good as Robinson Crusoe. The one is not so much like a vision, nor is the other so much like the reality.

The first volume of Cowper's poems has, however, been less read than it deserved. The comparison in these poems of the proud and humble believer to the peac.o.c.k and the pheasant, and the parallel between Voltaire and the poor cottager, are exquisite pieces of eloquence and poetry, particularly the last.

"Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door, Pillow and bobbins all her little store; Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay, Shuffling her threads about the live-long day, Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night, Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light; She, for her humble sphere by nature fit, Has little understanding, and no wit, Receives no praise; but, though her lot be such, (Toilsome and indigent) she renders much; Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true-- A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew; And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes Her t.i.tle to a treasure in the skies.

O happy peasant! Oh unhappy bard!

His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward; He prais'd, perhaps, for ages yet to come, She never heard of half a mile from home: He lost in errors his vain heart prefers, She safe in the simplicity of hers."

His character of Whitfield, in the poem on Hope, is one of his most spirited and striking things. It is written _con amore_.

"But if, unblameable in word and thought, A man arise, a man whom G.o.d has taught, With all Elijah's dignity of tone, And all the love of the beloved John, To storm the citadels they build in air, To smite the untemper'd wall ('tis death to spare,) To sweep away all refuges of lies, And place, instead of quirks, themselves devise, Lama Sabachthani before their eyes; To show that without Christ all gain is loss, All hope despair that stands not on his cross; Except a few his G.o.d may have impressed, A tenfold phrensy seizes all the rest."

These lines were quoted, soon after their appearance, by the Monthly Reviewers, to shew that Cowper was no poet, though they afterwards took credit to themselves for having been the first to introduce his verses to the notice of the public. It is not a little remarkable that these same critics regularly d.a.m.ned, at its first coming out, every work which has since acquired a standard reputation with the public.--Cowper's verses on his mother's picture, and his lines to Mary, are some of the most pathetic that ever were written. His stanzas on the loss of the Royal George have a masculine strength and feeling beyond what was usual with him. The story of John Gilpin has perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as any thing of the same length that ever was written.

His life was an unhappy one. It was embittered by a morbid affection, and by his religious sentiments. Nor are we to wonder at this, or bring it as a charge against religion; for it is the nature of the poetical temperament to carry every thing to excess, whether it be love, religion, pleasure, or pain, as we may see in the case of Cowper and of Burns, and to find torment or rapture in that in which others merely find a resource from _ennui_, or a relaxation from common occupation.

There are two poets still living who belong to the same cla.s.s of excellence, and of whom I shall here say a few words; I mean Crabbe, and Robert Bloomfield, the author of the Farmer's Boy. As a painter of simple natural scenery, and of the still life of the country, few writers have more undeniable and una.s.suming pretensions than the ingenious and self-taught poet, last-mentioned. Among the sketches of this sort I would mention, as equally distinguished for delicacy, faithfulness, and _naivete_, his description of lambs racing, of the pigs going out an acorning, of the boy sent to feed his sheep before the break of day in winter; and I might add the innocently told story of the poor bird-boy, who in vain through the live-long day expects his promised companions at his hut, to share his feast of roasted sloes with him, as an example of that humble pathos, in which this author excels.

The fault indeed of his genius is that it is too humble: his Muse has something not only rustic, but menial in her aspect. He seems afraid of elevating nature, lest she should be ashamed of him. Bloomfield very beautifully describes the lambs in springtime as racing round the hillocks of green turf: Thomson, in describing the same image, makes the mound of earth the remains of an old Roman encampment. Bloomfield never gets beyond his own experience; and that is somewhat confined. He gives the simple appearance of nature, but he gives it naked, shivering, and unclothed with the drapery of a moral imagination. His poetry has much the effect of the first approach of spring, "while yet the year is unconfirmed," where a few tender buds venture forth here and there, but are chilled by the early frosts and nipping breath of poverty.--It should seem from this and other instances that have occurred within the last century, that we cannot expect from original genius alone, without education, in modern and more artificial periods, the same bold and independent results as in former periods. And one reason appears to be, that though such persons, from whom we might at first expect a restoration of the good old times of poetry, are not enc.u.mbered and enfeebled by the trammels of custom, and the dull weight of other men's ideas; yet they are oppressed by the consciousness of a want of the common advantages which others have; are looking at the tinsel finery of the age, while they neglect the rich unexplored mine in their own b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and instead of setting an example for the world to follow, spend their lives in aping, or in the despair of aping, the hackneyed accomplishments of their inferiors. Another cause may be, that original genius alone is not sufficient to produce the highest excellence, without a corresponding state of manners, pa.s.sions, and religious belief: that no single mind can move in direct opposition to the vast machine of the world around it; that the poet can do no more than stamp the mind of his age upon his works; and that all that the ambition of the highest genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of one or two generations, is the perfection of that more refined and effeminate style of studied elegance and advent.i.tious ornament, which is the result, not of nature, but of art. In fact, no other style of poetry has succeeded, or seems likely to succeed, in the present day. The public taste hangs like a millstone round the neck of all original genius that does not conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied ma.s.s of materials for his mind to work upon and a.s.similate unconsciously to itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction, and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserved ridicule.

But to return.

Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literal of our descriptive poets. He exhibits the smallest circ.u.mstances of the smallest things. He gives the very costume of meanness; the nonessentials of every trifling incident. He is his own landscape-painter, and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem p.r.i.c.ked on paper in little dotted lines. He describes the interior of a cottage like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or upon four. If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a ragged counterpane as an event in history. He is equally curious in his back-grounds and in his figures. You know the Christian and surnames of every one of his heroes,--the dates of their achievements, whether on a Sunday or a Monday,--their place of birth and burial, the colour of their clothes, and of their hair, and whether they squinted or not. He takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the same manner as of the furniture of a sick room: his sentiments have very much the air of fixtures; he gives you the petrifaction of a sigh, and carves a tear, to the life, in stone. Almost all his characters are tired of their lives, and you heartily wish them dead. They remind one of anatomical preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life that a stuffed cat in a gla.s.s-case does to the real one purring on the hearth: the skin is the same, but the life and the sense of heat is gone. Crabbe's poetry is like a museum, or curiosity-shop: every thing has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and ident.i.ty of character. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is a kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. He sets his own imagination in the stocks, and his Muse, like Malvolio, "wears cruel garters." He collects all the petty vices of the human heart, and superintends, as in a panopticon, a select circle of rural malefactors. He makes out the poor to be as bad as the rich--a sort of vermin for the others to hunt down and trample upon, and this he thinks a good piece of work. With him there are but two moral categories, riches and poverty, authority and dependence. His parish apprentice, Richard Monday, and his wealthy baronet, Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place, are the same individual-- the extremes of the same character, and of his whole system. "The latter end of his Commonwealth does not forget the beginning." But his parish ethics are the very worst model for a state: any thing more degrading and helpless cannot well be imagined. He exhibits just the contrary view of human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar's Opera. In a word, Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the _still life_ of tragedy: who gives the stagnation of hope and fear-- the deformity of vice without the temptation--the pain of sympathy without the interest--and who seems to rely, for the delight he is to convey to his reader, on the truth and accuracy with which he describes only what is disagreeable.

The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, to be found in our descriptive poets. There are set descriptions of the flowers, for instance, in Thomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to those in Milton's Lycidas, and in the Winter's Tale.

We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine. The best parts of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd's Tale, and the Oak and the Briar; which last is as splendid a piece of oratory as any to be found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate! Browne, who came after Spenser, and Withers, have left some pleasing allegorical poems of this kind. Pope's are as full of senseless finery and trite affectation, as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picture with a crook and c.o.c.ked hat on, smiling with an insipid air of no-meaning, between nature and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a lasting monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that of "the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old," peeps out once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin's picture, in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription--"I also was an Arcadian!" Perhaps the best pastoral in the language is that prose-poem, Walton's Complete Angler. That well-known work has a beauty and romantic interest equal to its simplicity, and arising out of it. In the description of a fishing-tackle, you perceive the piety and humanity of the author's mind. It is to be doubted whether Sannazarius's Piscatory Eclogues are equal to the scenes described by Walton on the banks of the river Lea. He gives the feeling of the open air: we walk with him along the dusty road-side, or repose on the banks of the river under a shady tree; and in watching for the finny prey, imbibe what he beautifully calls "the patience and simplicity of poor honest fishermen." We accompany them to their inn at night, and partake of their simple, but delicious fare; while Maud, the pretty milk-maid, at her mother's desire, sings the cla.s.sical ditties of the poet Marlow; "Come live with me, and be my love." Good cheer is not neglected in this work, any more than in Homer, or any other history that sets a proper value on the good things of this life. The prints in the Complete Angler give an additional reality and interest to the scenes it describes. While Tottenham Cross shall stand, and longer, thy work, amiable and happy old man, shall last!--It is in the notes to it that we find that character of "a fair and happy milkmaid," by Sir Thomas Overbury, which may vie in beauty and feeling with Chaucer's character of Griselda.

"A fair and happy milk-maid is a country wench that is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of her's is able to put all face-physic out of countenance. She knows a fair look is but a dumb orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellences stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge. The lining of her apparel (which is herself) is far better than outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the silkworm, she is decked in innocency, a far better wearing. She doth not, with lying long in bed, spoil both her complexion and conditions.

Nature hath taught her, too immoderate sleep is rust to the soul: she rises therefore with chanticleer, her dame's c.o.c.k, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made hayc.o.c.k. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel) she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of Fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well.

She bestows her year's wages at next fair; and in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and chirurgery, and she lives the longer for't. She dares go alone, and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet, to say the truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not palled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste, that she dare tell them; only a Friday's dream is all her superst.i.tion; that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she; and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."

The love of the country has been sung by poets, and echoed by philosophers; but the first have not attempted, and the last have been greatly puzzled to account for it. I do not know that any one has ever explained, satisfactorily, the true source of this feeling, or of that soothing emotion which the sight of the country, or a lively description of rural objects hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Some have ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty of the objects themselves; others to the freedom from care, the silence and tranquillity which scenes of retirement afford; others to the healthy and innocent employments of a country life; others to the simplicity of country manners, and others to a variety of different causes; but none to the right one. All these, indeed, have their effect; but there is another princ.i.p.al one which has not been touched upon, or only slightly glanced at. I will not, however, imitate Mr. Horne Tooke, who after enumerating seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out "the heart of his mystery." I will say at once what it is that distinguishes this interest from others, and that is its _abstractedness_. The interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and transferable from one object to all others of the same cla.s.s. Thus.