"THE

HE love of Nature," the meaning of which term we understand without explanation, has reached

its greatest and most various development in the nineteenth century. It had always been a part of an artist's soul among the Aryan families of the earth, but in these last hundred years Nature has risen almost into an equality with humanity as a subject of art. In our own country, Turner, during a long life, shaped into thousands of pictures, drawings, and studies, the impressions he received from solitary Nature, and with a passion which, changing its methods year by year, never changed its intensity. And he was only the greatest of a host of painters who have, in solitary love of Nature for her own sake, recorded her doings and her feelings with an intimacy, affection, and joy which has been as eager and as productive in France as in England. The musicians. were not apart from this movement. We know from their letters and books that they composed a great number of pieces for the express purpose of recording all

they felt in the presence of Nature, and when alone with her. The prose-writers of fiction and fancy gave themselves up almost too much to natural description; and many books exist which are nothing more than emotional statements of the profound love of their writers for Nature in her solitudes. The poets were not, of course, behindhand. England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, but chiefly the three first, were driven to express this love of Nature when they were isolated with her as a bridegroom with a bride.

Wordsworth was the first to lift this love of Nature for her own sake into a worship; and it passed on, receiving no less incense, to Walter Scott and Byron, to Shelley and Keats. It exists, undiminished, in Browning, in Swinburne, and Morris, and in a host of other poets whose names we need not here recall. Each of these had his own special way of feeling the beauty of the natural world, and his own manner of representing it, but the lonely love they all felt was the steady element underneath their individual forms of expression. Tennyson had his own method, and it was different from that of all the others. It differed curiously, and the results to which we are led, when we consider it, are curious.

Mainly speaking, that difference consists in the absence from his mind of any belief or conception of a life in Nature. He described Nature, on the whole, as senses, as she appeared on the outside. He did it with extraordinary skill, observation, accuracy,

she was to his

and magnificence; and we are full of delight with this work of his. I have dwelt on it from poem to poem, and I hope I have succeeded in making clear my full admiration of its power, beauty, variety, and range. But when we have done all this, and think less of particular descriptions, and more of the whole impression made by his work on Nature, we are surprised to find that our interest in Tennyson's poetry of natural description is more intellectual than emotional. We ask why, and the answer is, He did not conceive of Nature as alive. He did not love her as a living Being.

Again, when we read his natural descriptions, we find them drenched with humanity. It is impossible, save very rarely, to get away in them from the sorrows, or the joys of man. But when we do not meet with humanity in his landscape, the landscape by itself is cold. It rarely has any sentiment of its own. The sentiment in it is imposed upon it by the human soul; so that, at last, we are driven to say: "On the whole, this poet did not care much to be alone with Nature, and did not love her dearly for her own sake. And this is strange; it is unlike any other great poet of this century."

These are the two curious wants in his poetry of Nature, and I believe I can make most clear how he differed from the other poets by describing their position towards Nature in contrast with his own.

I take Wordsworth first. I need not say too much about his view of Nature. I have written of it elsewhere, and many others have also dwelt upon it. But, largely.

speaking, he believed within his poetic self that Nature was alive in every vein of her; thought, loved, felt, and enjoyed in her own way, not in a way the same as we, but in a similar way, so similar that we could communicate with her and she with us, as one spirit can communicate with another. There is a sympathy between us; but there is this difference, that, with few exceptions, she is the giver and we the receiver. Then. what is true of the whole of Nature is true of the parts, Every flower, cloud, bird and beast, every mountain, wood, and every tree, every stream, the great sky and the mighty being of the ocean, shared in the life of the whole, and made it, in themselves, a particular life. Each of them enjoyed, felt, loved, thought, in its own fashion and in a different fashion from the rest. Each of them could send its own special life to us men, as well as to one another; could give us sympathy and receive our gratitude. This was no mere dream, it was a reality to Wordsworth. It is not the fancy of a lover of his, gathered from poetic phrases in his work, nor is it an impossible philosophy. No one can say that it may not be true. It cannot be proved, indeed, but it cannot be disproved. He lays it down in clear form at the end of The Recluse as a theory which is at the base of all his poetry of Nature and Man. There is a pre-arranged harmony, he says, between man's mind and the natural world which fits them to one another, which enables them to wed one another; and the philosophic ground of this theory is that both

Nature and Man, being alike from God, and existing together in God, are capable, when separated from one another in this phenomenal world, of coming together again, and finding themselves to be consciously in a union, one with another, of mutual joy and consolation. This was the philosophic conception in the realm of which he always lived. Imagination took it up, and clothed it with glory and honour, and put into it an eager heart of life, so that Nature was his dearest friend, and all its motions in all things his passionate delight. Wherever he went, he had perfect companions, and each of them had something new to say. Wherever he went, he saw all things in an intercommunion, the love of which, being given and received, made the majesty, beauty, and harmony of the universe; and the sight filled him with incommunicable rapture. And this intercommunion was of life with life. In one word, every distinct thing in Nature had a soul of its own. He seems to have gone even further. Every place with all the separate lives which belonged to its flowers, clouds, stones, lakes, streams, and trees-had, over and above these lives, a collective life of its own. Hence such phrases as "the souls of lonely places." And, finally, all the souls of these separate places and of all their separate objects, together ran up into the Spirit of the Earth, and then into the One Spirit of the Universe.

Shelley (without Wordsworth's quasi-philosophic ground for his belief) held at root the same idea that Wordsworth held-that all the universe was alive, and