When Wither, in
words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, says of his muse,--
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,--
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man,--
he felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere
collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some
sense of her mysterious whole.
Passages like this, however, must not he too closely pressed. The
mystic element in English literature has run for the most part into
other channels; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and
convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by
Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it was
in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate
worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have mere
picturesqueness,--a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of
reproducing her,--a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or
sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks on
Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory to the
expression of human love and woe.
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