have seen the same impulse in Shelley, in whose hands it rises to sublimity. By that perfect artist and eminently original poet, Coventry Patmore, is a second Winter scene, wholly different, yet equally true, while more deeply imaginative— I, singularly moved. To love the lovely that are not beloved, Of all the Seasons, most Love Winter, and to trace The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face. And the dim cloud that does the world enfold Than warmth and light asleep; And correspondent breathing seems to keep With the infant harvest, breathing soft below Nor is in field or garden anything But, duly look'd into, contains serene The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring, Often, in sheltering brakes, As one from rest disturb'd in the first hour, And deems 'tis time to flower: Though not a whisper of her voice he hear, The buried bulb does know The signals of the year, And hails far Summer with his lifted spear. Patmore's fine fancies here recall Henry Vaughan and his nature-details, so curiously observed, so deeply significant. A place of its own must be given to the landscape of J. C. Shairp (1819-85), than whom, of Scotland's many faithful sons, none was more devoted to her,―nay, perhaps, almost too exclusively. No one, if we put aside Ossian, known to me, has felt or rendered so deeply the gloom, the sublime desolation of the Highland region. That overpowering sense of weight and grandeur which calls forth the inward cry to the mountains to cover us, as we pass beneath some vast precipice, in truth, was always with Shairp. He has not his beloved Wordsworth's mastery, his brightness of soul, his large philosophy of Nature; nor, in the region of art, Wordsworth's fine finish, his happiness of phrase: the minor key dominates.But, united with great delicacy of sentiment and touch, he has the never-failing charm of perfect high-hearted sincerity; and if we reflect on the long-lasting hatred or indifference which mountain lands have met from poetry, Shairp, so far as his skill served, merits a high place in characteristically modern verse. It is this aspect of Nature which the poet ascribes to a young wanderer in the West Highlands On his spirit solemn awe Fell when, the summit won, he saw To westward Knoydart peaks up-crowd, Like splinter'd spears, weird peaks of Skye ; From ocean's outer mystery.2 Now, the desolate moor of Rannoch— Yea! a desert wide and wasted, Wash'd by rain-floods to the bones; And along these dreary levels, As by some stern destiny placed, East and west and northward sweeping 1 Cut into hollows. 2 Glen Desseray, Canto iii, 2 (1888). Like a vast low-heaving ocean, And the Atlantic sends his pipers Clouds and mists and rains before them Here to wage their all-night battle, We have here, as elsewhere in Shairp's work, no attempt at elaborate word-painting, no moral drawn. But by faithful unadorned description what he presents is the very soul of the scene: the strange sublimity, the terror of the "waste "2 wilderness to the sensitive heart 66 1 Up the long corrie, through the screetan 1 rents, This peak of crumbled rock my lone watch-tower, All trace of human feeling-only reach'd 1 Stony ravine on mountain-side. CHAPTER XVII THE LANDSCAPE OF BROWNING, ARNOLD, BARNES, AND CHARLES TENNYSON THE vital force of our recent poetry may, I think, be inferred from the singularly diverse styles in which the genius of the singers who now remain-each eminent, though in different orders or degrees of eminence-manifested itself. Among these I shall first attempt to deal with Robert Browning (1812-1889). Poets, like landscape painters, often have an instinctive preference for certain aspects, or for certain provinces, of Nature. Thus Scott, with his un-selfconscious touch, loves to sketch a scene from Highland or Lowland boldly and broadly, -deeply as he loved Nature, yet more often as a background to his figures than for description's sake. Shelley, with a more refined, visionary art, reigns supreme in cloudland and storm and wild imaginary spectacle; while Wordsworth, like Turner, has landscape at his command, from the "meanest "flower" to all the majesty of heaven. We have noticed how this broad and wide treatment of scenery has diminished with our artists, whether in words or colours, as the century advances. Minute points and foregrounds are now more largely dwelt on-a change probably connected with the vast development of the photograph. Thus Tennyson has comparatively more fine close detail than Wordsworth. But in Robert Browning, to whom we now turn, the foreground has wellnigh become the landscape, and is painted with a sharpness of touch and colour which may remind us of Dürer's or William Hunt's marvellous water-colours. S Browning, as was natural to his peculiarly fixed temperament, his powerful overruling idiosyncrasy, remained singularly unchanged throughout his long career. Yet it is singular that Pauline, the remarkable poem which he wrote at twenty (1832), has a freedom of touch, a breadth, in its landscape, a "joy in "the world's loveliness," which, it has been truly said,1 never returned to him. With this also is a certain simplicity in style, too infrequent in his work, due, perhaps, to his deep early devotion to Keats and Shelley. Thus, addressing the imagined lady of the song Thou wilt remember one warm morn, when Winter In the sunshine were white with coming buds, Like the bright side of a sorrow-and the banks Something of Alastor, passionately admired by Browning, is here also audible. Yet one finds something, too, of his own later manner. As the poem pursues its mystical course, setting forth obscurely Browning's youthful inner experiences of thought and feeling, a kind of panorama is given. It is a landscape, built "in thought," to which he invites Pauline, whom I take to be a figure of Browning's beloved sister, somewhat idealised— Night, and one single ridge of narrow path Between the sullen river and the woods Waving and muttering, for the moonless night Has shaped them into images of life, Like the uprising of the giant-ghosts, Day and noon follow; then See this our new retreat Wall'd in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, 1 W. Sharp, Browning, 1890. |