all Sufeyism to be the worship of the | There we will sit on that beautiful moun tain, and watch the little stars in their sleepless flight. Among English poets, Coleridge displayed a good deal of this temper, and The sounding cataract I have felt good and the beautiful, as expressed by nature's beauty; and he promised some day to show that it was nothing more than the development of the primeval religion of the Aryan race. The truth seems to be that this ec- | Wordsworth had much more than Colestatic temper has but little to do with ridge, as may be seen from the followraces, but is the individual expression ing example : of certain exceptional souls to be found in several races. In Celtic poetry that | Haunted me like a passion. hymn to May day, which, whether it was or was not written by "Ossian's father," as affirmed by the editor of the "Transactions of the Ossianic Society," is certainly very old, is full of this response to nature's magnetism, and is very beautiful with its description of the heath spreading out its long hair as if in delight at the blackbird's song and the cuckoo's chant. The Finns and the North American Indians have not much to do with the Aryans, yet they seem to know this ecstasy. The poet of the Kalevala exclaims: The waves of the sea have spoken to me; the wild birds have taught me, the music of many waters has been my master. And Mr. Leland has translated a most Come, my moo sarge, let us go up that climbs to the beautiful skies. their chief. We will also watch the northern lights playing their game of ball in their cold, shiny country. There we will sit, on the beautiful mountain, and listen to the thunder (Badankac) beating his drum. We will see the lightning when she lights her pipe. We will see the great whirlwind running a race with betchi-vesay (squall). A presence that disturbs me with the joy And rolls through all things. Keats, too, in the “Ode to a Nightingale," passes gloriously into this mood. But, of course, it is to Shelley among English poets that one naturally turns when the Sufeyistic rapture of the nature-intoxicated poet comes under discussion. An essay might be filled with examples of Shelley's ecstatic hymns to nature and about nature, full of a Sufeyism such as is surpassed in no literature, and such as was never equalled until the appearance of Mr. Swinburne, upon whom Shelley's mantle in this respect seems to have fallen. Indeed it would be difficult to say which is the most overflowing with the quality under discussion, Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and the "Ode to a Skylark," or Mr. Swinburne's nature-lyrics, from the cho ruses in "Atalanta" down to his latest poem. Of this temper Tennyson shows nothing; for such impassioned addresses to nature as occur in “Maud” are inspired by a lover's passion for his mistress, and have nothing to do with the Sufeyistic passion of the natureintoxicated poet. Nor is there any sign ilate the beauty of a landscape and in his poems that before he can assim make it his own he has to translate the mental image of it into poetic diction and metre, as Weber had to translate his mental image of a landscape into the language of absolute music. With regard to the third group of poets, those who give us pictures of nature that seem painted for their own sake, whatever might have been the real impulse of any one of the ancient poets (whether Sophocles in the "Edipus Coloneus" felt the impulse to go on describing his beloved groves, or whether Eschylus in the "Prometheus" felt the impulse to make a picture of the dimpling deep, or in the "Agamemnon" felt the impulse to pursue his marvellous description of the sultry sea), as a matter of fact, it is only the poets of the modern world who have exhibited in any great degree the impulse to linger over the beauties of nature until the human interest of the poem is weakened. For, lovely as are the descriptive touches of Theocritus and his followers, they cannot be said to arrest the dramatic action; they make it move a little more slowly, that is all. In the modern world, the country that has produced William Browne and James Thomson, William Wordsworth and John Clare, stood at the head of all others in the matter of descriptive poetry, even before Tennyson came. But have not the very words, "Tennyson as a nature-poet," a magic in them? I think they will carry the mind of many a reader of this review far away from the dust and noise of the London season, to that well-remembered day when first he revelled in the delights of Tennyson's English idylls, reading the precious little green volume, perhaps, under the elms of an English home, as he lay, a dreamy boy, on the grass, undisturbed by any sound save the bird-voices from the thicket, the caw of the homing rooks sailing towards the spinney, the low of a cow kneedeep in the river-shallows glittering golden at one moment, at the next rosy, or the crunching sound of teeth cropping and tearing the daisied grass beside the brook, as a feeding horse drew nearer and nearer with lazy stamp of foot and swish of tail, while Twilight poured On dewy pastures, dewy trees, To say that, as a painter of the beau ties of nature for their own sake, Tennyson stands before all the "Georgian poets" is, no doubt, to utter a bold saying, for it is to put him in this respect above very great masters in this line: above the poet who wrote "The Prelude," "The Excursion," and the lines on Tintern Abbey ; above him who wrote "Christabel," above him who wrote the ode to a skylark, above him who wrote the "Ode to a Nightingale." In depicting landscape, whether by the painter's art or the poet's, there are always two matters for consideration: the contour of the land and the life, vegetable and animal, that clothes it, and it is necessary to bear in mind that the poet who takes a first place in rendering one of these two elements of a landscape will sometimes take only a second place in rendering another; though, of course, there is no psychological necessity why this should often happen. In delineating the contour of the land, Tennyson allows himself a freedom of composition unknown to the art of Wordsworth. It is this as much as anything which lends that brilliance to his pictures which is one of their chief characteristics. These pictures are flashed, not upon the mental perception merely of the reader, but upon his very senses. Own The method is legitimate enough, as Coleridge, judging from his descriptions, would have allowed; but Wordsworth would not have sanctioned it. For while Wordsworth's one desire is to paint the contour of the land before him with the same accuracy with which Tennyson paints vegetation, Tennyson's desire is to seize the characteristic features of the land's outline, and exercise upon them that artistic composition of which he is so great a master. The composition of the landscape in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is scarcely more bold and more triumphant than is the composition of some of Tennyson's quiet pictures. And yet so consummate an artist is | Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, he that the effect is that of realism. It And crimson-lined the stately palm When he sang the song of the brook he was not celebrating the clear and rapid streamlet that glances past Tetford with a ripple like a smile just breaking into laugh ter; but the summer setting of his immortal burden - the fairy forelands, the sailing blossom, the fresh wet ferns - belongs to a flat country. The truth seems to be that, plastic as is the poetic temperament, apt as it is to recall those special aspects of nature by which in childhood the poet was surrounded, there is sometimes an ancestral strain in human nature which is stronger than any environment, giving a man an instinctive passion for mountain scenery, or for woodlands, or for the sea, irrespective altogether of birthplace associations. And as to Tennyson, so masterly is his hand in painting nature, that it is not so easy as is generally supposed to say what kind of landscape he paints best. The perfection of his descriptions of Lincolnshire scenery should not blind us to the perfection of his other descriptions of nature, where the scenery is of a very different kind. In the power of calling up imaginary landscape he never had an equal, save Coleridge, among English poets. Had he been as familiar with the loveliness of the Pacific islands as Herman Melville or Mr. Louis Stevenson, it is difficult to imagine how he could have described it more gorgeously than he has done in those marvellous verses to Milton: Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India LIVING AGE. VOL. LXXXIII. woods Whisper in odorous heights of even. And it is equally difficult to imagine that, had he himself undergone Enoch Arden's experience on the coral island, he could have given us a picture more vivid, and at the same time more true, than this: The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again More wonderful still is the following picture of a city on a distant mountainside, as viewed through the desiccated air of a tropical desert country, where objects at an immense distance are seen dwarfed, as though the observer were looking through the wrong end of a telescope : He seems as one whose footsteps halt, As regards his exercise of composition in landscape, if we compare that passage in "The Prelude " where Wordsworth paints the moon rising over Snowdon with one of Tennyson's bits of mountain scenery, we shall see the fundamental difference between the methods of the two poets : For instantly a light upon the turf 4263 Rested a silent sea of hoary mist. A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved Into the main Atlantic, that appeared none Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars All meek and silent, save that through a rift Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed abysmal, gloomy, breathing-placeMounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens. Here the charm of the description depends very much on the fact that we feel it at once to be an actual transcript of nature. Now, let us first compare the passage with a landscape written by Tennyson in the Pyrenees, and published in 1833, a landscape displaying as little attempt at composition as is discoverable in Wordsworth's lines: There is a dale in Ida, lovelier Than any in old Ionia, beautiful With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean Above the loud glenriver, which hath worn A path thro' steep-down granite walls be low, Mantled with flowering tendriltwine. In front The cedarshadowy valleys open wide. Ten years afterwards this same landscape appeared transfigured by the hand of the greatest master of composition that has ever appeared in English poetry. And now compare all the three with each other: There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier The swimming vapor slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal No doubt it is hill scenery, and not mountain scenery, that both poets give us here; the true atmosphere of the mountains above the belt of vegetation is a very different thing. Shelley's description of the Eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape, or sound of life is not without this atmosphere; and the same may be said of Byron's lines in "Manfred: ". Ye crags upon whose extreme edge I stand, and on the torrent's brink beneath Behold the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs In dizziness of distance. Byron on several occasions showed that he had a real imaginative sympathy with treeless, herbless peaks and glaciers, and, had his physical infirmities allowed it, he might have brought into poetry the true magic of Alpine scenery - perhaps the one thing in landscape still left for the poet to achieve. Save in the modest Wordsworthian way, the poet is not often a mountaineer. And it is to be feared that our contemporary knights of the alpenstock would not get much enjoyment out of the mountain atmosphere, even of Shelley and Byron. The man who could keep his head at the Dent du Géant, or ascend the Matterhorn from Breil by aid of "Maquignaz's rope," or accompany Mr. Crawford Grove along that narrow ribbon of path, a few inches wide, winding upwards, corkscrew-wise, round the mountain's very top, with an abyss yawning thousands of feet below, could hardly be expected to feel much of a thrill from the subject of the contour of the land the word-painting of the boldest moun- in descriptive poetry. tain bard. It is not the Matterhorn, as I have once before hinted, but only Parnassus, that you can effectively climb in dreams. With regard to descriptions of the life, vegetable and animal, that clothes the land, it is here that the poetry of England is far richer than any other poetry. How, indeed, should it be Perhaps, indeed, the delight of gaz- otherwise, seeing that the English poet ing in the distance at the mighty vistas has for fatherland the one country of mountain scenery has but little to do whose beauties in regard to her vegewith the passion for mountaineering, table garment seem most to glow with which is entirely modern. Not, of the very breath of nature's life. It is course, that the knight of the alpen- not till we have seen the loveliest spots stock is without the poet's love of na- in Europe that we are fully able to enture's beauties; but then, his first joy the peculiar loveliness of England; passion is to climb. The steeple-jack | it is not until we have drunk our fill of of "Parvati," the "Lady of the Hills" the grandeur of Continental scenery, (who becomes Natura Benigna or Na- not until we have tasted the awed raptura Maligna according to the strength ture which comes upon the soul in the or the weakness of the feet that climb), mountain-fastnesses of the Alps, that the mountaineer, alone knows nature we really understand the witchery of in her most secret lairs, and, knowing England that entranced Tennyson more her, he must needs worship such might and more with every year that passed as hers; but first and foremost he is a over his head, the witchery of this climber. In the same way that the England, which he has left more bespectacle of Epsom Downs on Derby loved than ever he found it. Yes, Day is a mere dream-picture to the indeed-though ever since the time business-like member of the ring, and when Chaucer's in the same way that the fairy-like loveliness of a salmon-river is a mere dream-picture to the true salmon-fisher, so the dazzling vistas of beauty to be seen from lofty mountain peaks form but a dream-picture to the climber, whose business it is to keep up with his guides. The passion for the glories of mountain scenery is of so recent a birth that there has scarcely been time, as yet, for the true mountaineer-poet to be evolved. When nature shall have joined in one and the same man the peculiar gifts of the contemporary mountaineer with "the vision and the But what is the cause of the peerless faculty divine," the spirit of the moun- beauty of Tennyson's England? Does tains will find a voice in poetry. But it lie in the gentle contour of the land ? even apart from the hopes we may Scarcely so, for there are large sweeps have that some of our younger poets of landscape just as gentle and just as may import the true mountain atmo- undulatory in Italy and in France as in sphere into poetry, Tennyson himself has shown how rash it is to say that any tour de force is beyond that marveilous power, a great poet's imagina tion. Already, however, as much space as can be here afforded has been given to Elf quene with hira joly compagnie The horns of Elfland faintly blowing, England has seemed to her poets the natural domain of nature's more beneficent forces, the real home-park of Oberon and Titania, the real playground of all the good-people of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - Tennyson has left her more beloved than ever he found her. England. If we study Tennyson well, especially if we study him in this beautiful month, and among such surroundings as those indicated in the opening words of this essay, we may learn the secret of England's witchery - we may learn that it lies largely in the peculiar |