Puslapio vaizdai
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am aware of, to gain by depreciating the sea, which indeed, if only in respect of its size and strength, it would ill become any one less presumptuous than that little prig, Charoba, in Landor's Gebir, to underrate. But without being prepared to say coldly, with long-lashed eyes abased, Is this the mighty ocean, is this all?'' one may be prepared to contend that the ocean has no such powerfully soothing or intimately searching influence for the human heart as has, for instance, a sweep of English pasture broken in the distance by lines of purple woodland, rising tier above tier, in dimmer and dimmer coloring, till they melt into the sky. I regard it as preposterous to say that the sea has a tranquillizing effect, or that it is or can be permanently satisfying to a mind which seeks tranquillity before all things, and long before the mere delight of the eyes. The sea is a stimulant, not a sedative as the phenomena of external Nature which we oftenest contemplate ought, in these days especially, to be. Who are the poets who have expressed themselves most strongly on the subject of the sea? Men like Byron and Victor Hugo-both of them in reality types of the restless man of action, both of them driven only by enforced exile to the contemplation of Nature, and both of them far more attracted by the life and stir of great cities. Byron died before his wandering impulse had spent itself; but we may rely upon it that if he had lived beyond the age of fifty he would have settled down into an inveterate Londoner, with rooms in the Albany, and his own special table at the "Travellers." As for Victor Hugo, as soon as ever the culprit of "Les Châtiments" fell from power the exile of December returned to France, took a spacious "sky-parlor" in Paris to receive his worshippers in, and, roughly speaking, never set foot outside the fortifications to the day of his death.

These remarks, however, run some risk of being mistaken for a digression. My point is or was-that space and solitude alone are not the sole constituents of the "feeling" of the country, inasmuch as the sea is excellently well-found in the articles of space and solitude, and yet cannot claim to exercise anything like the soothing and chasten

ing charm of landscape upon a wellregulated mind. The differentiating element, that which the landscape possesses and the sea does not, is clearly the presence of organic life. It is the presence of organic life which gives to those open spaces of the earth on which such life abounds their strangely tranquillizing power. The spaces should not be too visibly bounded, because the sensation of the Infinite is undoubtedly an invariable. ingredient in this mental calm; but it is a mistake to suppose that the sensation of the Infinite is in itself a tranquillizing force. On the contrary, as any one will find who thoroughly absorbs himself for a few minutes in the contemplation of the starlit heavens, it is essentially a disquieting, a disturbing agency, as fraught with unrest, an unrest of its own, as is a persistent gaze on that quintessential concentration of the finite-a crowded street. It is only in the synthesis of the two that the mind can repose-it is only where man beholds the finite clasped, as it were, and hushed on the bosom of the infinite, that his mind becomes conscious of the contact of finite and infinite in its own nature, and feels the deep submerging peace which the sense of that contact must always and necessarily produce. How should the landscape fail to arouse this sense of contact, or the sea succeed? The sea is infinity, impersonality, nay, in the deeper sense, unchangeability itself. It leans illimitable upon an illimitable sky. The form of the matter upon which its forces, kindly or terrible, exert themselves is nothing; the forces themselves everything. The form of its matter-the finite element in the sea-is so incessantly shifting, that for us it is as good as non-existent; we can take no more account of it than we can of the matter of the heavenly bodies, which to us are no more than points of light. A sense of unity, a sense of a common infinity with the sea is as impossible as it is with the stars.

To space then and to solitude inust be added, in order to produce the distinctively tranquillizing effect of landscape, the felt presence of organic life. It is the total absence of this element which made the starlit heaven appear a "sad sicht" to Carlyle; it is its almost total absence that makes the desert and the glacier unfitting objects of continual con

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templation. And it is its presence which causes those vague longings that ocean, firmament, and desert only intensify, to be so instantaneously and mysteriously allayed by one glance at a Yorkshire moorland, or even at the misty flats, the long gaunt lines of poplar, the glimmering waterpools of a Flemish fen. organic life of whose presence we are conscious may permissibly be human; but if human it must be rare and remote. It must be little in amount, and it must make its little go a long way off. The sight of a distant human figure in the road or on the hillside, and even the faint sound of human voices will no doubt enhance the soothing influence of landscape, but they must be far enough away to raise the particular human being who excites these sensations from the level of the individual to that of the species. He must have ceased to be a man and have become merely Man. He must, in Schopenhauerian terminology, have become a simple "objectification of the Will in Nature," and must partake sensibly of the infinity and the impersonality of that Will from which he emanates. Bring him nearer, near enough for one to recognize dress and features, and the finite element in him is sure to bulk so largely over the infinite as at once to introduce into the scene before us an element of discord and unrest. For all you know the man may be a Radical while you are a Conservative, or vice versa; but in any case his near approach can hardly fail to awaken in you a host of associations with the "World as Will," and to intercept to that extent your calm contemplation of the "World as Idea."

But having combined all these necessary ingredients-space, solitude, a sufficient presence of organic life, a sufficient distance between one's self and human life-having succeeded, I say, in obtaining a combination of all these things, and having sat ourselves down to contemplate it, are we even then sure that the true charm of the country will visit us, that the genuine message of the landscape will gain the ear of the soul? Alas! no. After everything has been done that can be done on the side of the Object, there is still the Subject to be reckoned with, and this is by far the more difficult matter of the two. The receptivity of the recipient-that is

everything; and how is that to be attained? I fear there is no royal road to its attainment-none. How many persons are there or how many, we may indeed ask, have there ever been-to whom Nature has spoken, once for all, her word of peace, and who thenceforth and for all time are at rest in her presence, and no more need to seek for beauty in her face than a child needs to seek it in the countenance of its mother? There are few indeed, I think, whether in the world of real life or in that of literature. Many a magic touch in Homer convinces us that he, beyond perhaps and above all poets who ever lived, had felt the kiss of Demeter on his brow. No one can read fifty lines of Lucretius and doubt that Nature spoke to him in her deepest, most solemn, most tranquillizing tones; but elsewhere among the ancient classics I am not sure that it would be easy to find it. No doubt an indignant plea will be urged for Virgil; and I could not, of course, complain if a certain famous passage in the Second Georgic-perhaps the whole poem itself would be put in"-were to be flung at me with an air of triumph. Yet, even so, I think I should be hardened enough to contend that there is a touch of the townsman in "O fortunatos nimium,”’ &c. It is all very charming that praise of secura quies.' and "latis otia fundis," of the speluncæ, viviquelaof the "mugitusque boum, mollesque sub arbore somni.' But there is a note of the jaded and disappointed

cus,

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courtier about the lines which immediately precede these. We cannot help remembering that the poet himself must have often formed one of the "mane salutantum unda," flowing forth into the street from the door of the patron; nor can we avoid the suspicion. possibly unjust in Virgil's case, that it is merely ennui and disgust with the life of Rome which has set him rhapsodizing on the delights of the country. Besides, why should a man who really loved the country require to be spirited up by Mecænas, at least as tradition has it, to write a poem about agriculture, with the object of reviving the industry? Think of the Georgics having been written "with a purpose!'' It is almost enough to spoil one's relish for them altogether. There is nothing, in fact, to show that Virgil

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cared much more, in any disinterested sense of the word, for the pastures and furrows of which he sang than Ben Jonson cared personally to hear the loud stag speak" across the silent chase in the night watches, for all the apparent earnestness of the poetic address to Sir Robert Wroth in which that fine line occurs. As to Horace, there is surely no room for doubt. He was as arrant a little Cockney as any that ever was dandled to the chimes of Bow Bells. There is scarcely a line in his praises of Tibur and of Anio which is not saturated with the "suburban" spirit—a thing as different and as far removed from the rural spirit as it is possible to conceive. The heretical proposition, in short, to which I am mustering courage to commit myself is, that it is the exception rather than the rule for the poets, even for those who have sung best of the country, to care-I will not say a pinch of snuff for the country, but enough about it to live out their lives in its midst. Falsely luxurious! will not man arise?" asks Thomson from the comfortable recesses of his four-poster; and it is on much the same terms that plenty of English poets have extolled those rural charms which never attracted them save at brief and uncertain intervals. Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Alfred Austin are shining exceptions to what I am inclined to regard as a general rule. Each of those two poets has long made his abode amid that sweet English scenery which each describes with a magic of his own. But their preferences have not been very numerously anticipated by their predecessors, as how should it be by any "genus irritabile" of mortals? A wise indifference to the world, to its struggles, defeats and victories, to the noisy voices of to-day, and even to the hymns of a future which will only be to-day a little prolonged-to attain to this is the first and great commandment which Nature imposes upon all those who come to her for spiritual sustenance and calm. And how few are they that bring it with them! How few are they who are really content with the food which she gives them, who are satisfied to receive her message, and if they must transmit it, repeat it simply, not tricking it out that they may revel in their own wealth of words, nor phil

osophizing too much upon it to exercise their subtlety of thought, nor lyrically subjectifying it to make it illustrate their own insignificant sorrows and unimportant joys! Is Keats never delinquent on the first count? Is not Wordsworth sometimes guilty on the second? Can Byron ever be acquitted on the third ?

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It is because of these shortcomings on the part of our greater poets, it is because they are so often wanting in the true surrender of the will, the due effacement of the striving Ego, that some few of us perhaps (I hardly know how many in these days it would be safe to reckon) may still discover in the verse of a writer long since deposed from the high place which he once occupied the purest and truest rendering of Nature's Peace be still!" There is no trace in Cowper of that magical might or that hand of power which all our supreme poets from Milton down to Tennyson have alike revealed in their description of the visible world of things. Vigorously as he uses his favorite metrical form, it cannot compare for majesty with the blank verse of the former of the two poets whom I have just mentioned, nor in wealth of harmonies and variety of cadence with that of the latter. There is a certain courtly stiffness in the manner of his approach to the subjects of his verse and to the readers whom he is addressing. But through all the peculiarities of the tongue in which he speaks to us the voice of the poet's heart is plainly heard, and in every word he utters we are made to feel how absolute has been his self-surrender to Nature, how complete his self-effacement in her presence. Cowper's constitutional shyness and selfdistrust, and his profound religious despondency, had conjointly extinguished the egoistic element in his character, and when he turned to the contemplation of the material world for relief and self-forgetfulness he did so almost in the spirit in which a medieval penitent submitted himself to the monastic vows. thus that in his work as a poet he found peace for himself; and it is to this that he owes that indescribable calm which breathes through his poetic utterances, and lends weight and dignity to much which were otherwise tame and commonplace.

It was

Strange indeed it were if this truest of

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seek

For their own sake, its silence and its shade."

The "none else" is the point to bear in mind, and also the fact that only those will seek, and when they find them, be contented with its silence and its shade, who bring to them a mind and heart attuned to the reception of their influences. For this, you need not indeed be like Cowper, "a stricken deer that left the herd long since," and purposed never to return to it. But you must possess the power, much more often talked about than possessed, of selfdetachment from the striving ambitions of life, and of self-surrender to that temper of contemplation which alone has power over the restlessness of the human

heart. The world of woe and bliss must be for a time as though it were not: or if this be a counsel of perfection, your state of mind must at least be that of which Mr. Meredith speaks in that weird. poem of his, the "Woods of Westermain." Your relation to the world must be that of one who is

But

Sharing still its bliss and woe,
Harnessed to its hungers, no.'

if you would go on to realize the poet's promise that

"On the throne Success usurps,

You shall seat the joy you feel,
Where a race of water chirps,

Twisting hues of flourished steel. Or where light is caught in hoop Up a clearing's leafy rise. . ." you must, I hold, be able to dethrone the lust for Success in all its shapes, and subdue the longing, not only for mere material gains, but even for intellectual and artistic achievement. You must be able to look into the face of Nature without desiring to sketch it, or to rhyme upon it, or even to talk about it, before you can expect with any reasonable confidence to receive her embrace and benediction.—Contemporary Review.

ALFRED, THE HERO KING.

A HISTORICAL BALLAD.

BY J. S. B.

I WILL sing of Saxon ALFREDAlfred, king, and clerk, and bard; Triple name, and triple glory,

By no stain of baseness marred.

Blood of Cerdic, blood of Ine,
Blood of Egbert in his veins ;
Reaper of the past, and sower

Of the future, Alfred reigns.

Mighty England, queen of peoples, Slept well-cradled in his breast, Grew to world-wide reach of lordship. From the Saxon of the West.

'Mid the leafy wealth of Berkshire Oak and beech in breezy play, 'Mid green England's gardened beauty, Up he shot into the day.

Shot and rose, and grew to youthhood, 'Neath a mother's gentle care, Osburh, with a soul as kindly

As the balmy summer air.

And he sat and breathed her sweetness,
And he drank with greedy ear

Tales of old ancestral glory,

When no plundering Danes were near. ⠀

And his heart did beat accordant,
And his eye with joy did swell,
When with mother's love she mingled
Matin chant and vesper bell.

Keen to learn and quick was Alfred,
From a song or from a book;
Never slow to catch the meaning
Of a gesture or a look.

Like wise bird that flits about

Linnet, finch, or crow, or sparrow

Pecking seed with lively beak,

From brown track of hoe or harrow;

Or like fruitful honey-bee

In bright glow of summer weather,
Wise the thorny spray to plunder,
Or the tufts of purple heather.

Mild was Alfred as a maiden;

But with soul untaught to fear,

He, in Hubert's craft the foremost,
Lanced the boar and chased the deer.

Nor in breezy forest only

Grew, and kind embrace of home, But with wondering eye young Alfred Saw the pomp of mighty Rome.

And with wider view grew wider,

And more wise with sifting ken, What to shun and what to gather

From the works of diverse men.

Thus the youth; but storms were brewing
From the rude sea roving clan,

Storms to front with manly stoutness,
When the youth should be a man.

Drifting as a gray blast drifteth

From the sharp and biting East,
Growing with the greed of plunder,
Ever as their spoil increased,

Came the Northmen. Where the waters
Of the Ouse, ship-bearing, sweep

Round the palace of the Cæsars;
Where on Durham's templed steep

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