jll ^^t^.-.--t?-/ '^. . ^.^ ^' K ■m^v'^-' ' <,s ^fe^ '^fci SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY HENRY SWEET Read before the Shelley Society, Wednesday, May 9, i888 it n ti n FEINTED FOR FRIVATE CIRCULATION 1891 ^ ^"^ S^A^ //^■^4a/fC ' I r- -$1 It ^ 1 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. By HENRY SWEET. Read before the SheHey Society, Wednesday, May gth, 1888. Beginnings of Nature-Poetry: The Rig-Veda. The first germs of those emotions which inspire the nature-poetry of a Shelley or a Wordsworth must be sought in the purely physical sensations of pleasure and pain which man has in common with the higher animals. The emotions which inspired Shelley in that famous description of sunrise which opens the second act of his Prometheus Unbound, can be traced back step by step to the sensations of a shivering savage basking in the genial warmth and welcome light which relieve him from the discomforts and terror of the night. To the emotion of fear is nearly allied that of wonder and awe ; and with the growth of intellect, wonder would naturally develop into curiosity, and the desire to fathom the mysteries of nature. This was the stage of development which had been reached by the ancient Hindu poets of the Rig-Veda — generally supposed to be about four thousand years old. But the spirit — though not the actual language — of most of these hymns is far older : the Rig- Veda — " Hymn- Veda " — might almost be called the Bible of the Aryan race, that race which includes Celts and Teutons as well as Greeks and Romans. The Rig- Veda is the true key to the origin of Aryan poetry, mythology, and religion. There is a peculiar fitness in making these old Hindu 411305 i J 270 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. hymns the starting-point of the present sketch; for no modern poetry, not even that of Wordsworth him- self, draws its inspiration so largely from inanimate nature. The character of that inspiration has already been indicated. It was one in which the sense of beauty is always associated with, and subordinated to, that of the pleasant and the useful. We find in the Vedic hymns many expressions of delight in the beauty of the dawn, personified — for in the Vedas everything is personified — as a beautiful virgin ; of fire, personified as a golden-haired youth ; of lightning ; and, indeed, of everything that is bright in nature. But the primitive Aryan would have been as blind to the beauty of the dawn as he was to that of sunset, had not the dawn been associated in his mind with the sense of relief from the terrors of the night. So also his admiration of the "golden-haired youth" was only a part of his gratitude to the " trusty house- friend," the " messenger to the gods." Lightning, too, was associated with the fertilising rain-clouds. The strongest emotions which nature excited in early Aryan minds were those of awe and wonder, whose first dawnings are so powerfully brought before us by Words- worth in a passage of the Prelude quoted by Mr. Myers in his Wordsivorth. In this description, as Mr. Myers re- marks, " the boy's mind is represented as passing tht-ough precisely the train of emotion which we may imagine to be at the root of the theology of many barbarous peoples," It will, therefore, be worth while to give the passage in full: " I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving- through the water Hke a swan ; — When from behind the craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again ; And, growing still in stature, the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, And measured motion like a living thing. Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned. And through the silent water stole my way Back to the covert of the willow tree ; SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 271 There in her mooring-place I left the bark, And through the meadows homeward went, in grave And serious mood. But after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being ; o'er my thoughts There hung a darkness — call it solitude, Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields ; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams." The key-note to the Vedic conception of nature is an overwhelming sense of its strength and man's weak- ness. The only heroes of Vedic song are the personified powers of nature — the sky, the storm, the lightning. Whenever human kings and heroes are mentioned, it is only to extol the might and goodness of the sky-god Indra, who delivers them from danger and captivity, and guides them to victory. So strong is the sense of man's weakness and helplessness that even animals are re- garded as his equals, if not his superiors. To the Vedic poets the bull is "the invincible one," and the cow is the "she-invincible." They were also deeply Impressed by the regulaj-ity of nature's operations — the unfailing succession of day and night and of the seasons, the unswerving path of the sun through the sky. This new sense of ideal law appealed to their moral as well as their intellectual faculties. The sublimest of natural objects — the sun — was to them something more than a magnified earthly king, whose power, however great, may be exercised capriciously and intermittently — he was a king whose laws admitted of no exception, all-seeing and all-powerful alike in detecting and in punishing crime. The intellectual contemplation of nature, as already remarked, has its source in the emotions of wonder and curiosity. The Vedic hymns are full of such questions as, How is it that the sun is not fastened to the sky, and yet falls not } the stars that shine at night, where do they hide themselves by day.? Sometimes these " obstinate questionings " deal with what we should consider very trivial problems, "llow is it that the 272 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. dark cow gives white milk ?" exclaims one of the Vedic poets in wonder and perplexity. Many of these questions were dismissed as insoluble, others were solved by the bold analogies and metaphors which constitute primitive mythology. In one of the hymns we are told that the sun is a tree, its rays being the roots, and that King Varuna (the " coverer " — a personification of the sky) planted it in the groundless regions of the air. We see a further development of this idea in the Yggdrasill or "world-ash" of the Scan- dinavian mythology. In other hymns we find the sun's rays regarded as levers or arms with which he is lifted up at dawn, and as legs with which he marches through the sky. Shelley's lines in Provietlieiis (i, 65) " Thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams !" would have been met by a primitive Aryan with the serious objection, How could the sun walk without legs .-* As has often been remarked, what to us is mere poetic fancy was- to them sober scientific truth. We see, then, that in this primitive stage, poetry, mythology, religion, and science were all one — they were all simply phases of the contemplation of nature. But this unity could no longer be maintained when poetry, mythology, religion and science had once asserted their independence. When, as was the case among the Greeks, the primitive Aryan nature-poetry had developed into epos and drama — the rude beginnings of which we can see even in the Vedic hymns, — when the old per- sonifications of sky and sun had been so humanised that all trace of their origin was lost, then nature itself was put in the background. This tendency was intensified by the growingcomplexity of social and political life. It was no longer a struggle of man against nature, but of man against man. The sense of beauty, too, is absorbed by the creations of the plastic arts : the poet of nature yields to the sculptor, architect, and painter ; or rather, he is hardly allowed to develop at all. Even in lyric poetry descriptions of nature are introduced only when subordinated to some human feeling or interest. SHELLEY'S NATURE- POETRY. 273 Celtic and Old English Poetry. In tracing the growth of nature-poetry in England, it will be worth while to glance at the characteristic fea- tures of Celtic and Old English (" Anglo-Saxon") poetry, especially as regards their treatment of nature. We will begin with Celtic literature, whose main cha- racteristics are familiar to most of us from the brilliant sketch of JNIr. Matthew Arnold. It is, however, to be regretted that he did not base his conclusions on a study of the Irish rather than the Welsh literature. The few remarks I shall ofter are founded on the old Irish prose tales, or sagas, which, unlike the Welsh, show no traces of mediaeval French influence, and are, indeed, hardly touched even by Christianity. Celtic literature, as every one knows, is distinguished above all by picturesqueness and vividness of fancy. It is fantastic, remote from real life, and shows an insatiable craving for the marvellous. It delights in sudden sur- prises : it is intensely sensational. In this respect the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, is, perhaps, the best modern type of an Old Irish story-teller. That ghastly tale o^ his, TJie Fall of the House of Usher, is thoroughly Celtic in its undisguised sacrifice of all considerations of probability and moral sense to the development of a telling situation. Fantastic as it is, Celtic literature is hardly ever vague or formless. It is full of the minutest descriptions, especially of the personal appearance, features, and dress of its heroes and heroines. These descriptions are in- spired by a delicate sense of beauty, shown above all in the extraordinary development of the colour-sense. The Irish as well as the Welsh sagas are full of colour-pic- tures. Thus we have in Irish literature the description of the young hero, Froech, swimming across the pool in the river, and carrying the branch of mountain-ash, whose red berries are contrasted with the whiteness of his body and the blackness of the pool. The Old Irish not only had a keen eye for contrasts of colour, but, what is still more remarkable, their literature is full of minute descriptions of shades of colour. Thus in the 1' 274 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. description of the hero Loegaire we are told that he had hair of three colours: brown at the roots, blood-red, in the middle, and like a diadem of gold on the surface. There is one famous colour-picture which passed from Celtic into Old French literature, and so became com- mon property of the Middle Ages. The Welsh version of it given by Mr. Arnold shows evident traces of French influence. An older and purely Celtic form of it occurs in the Old Irish tale, The Exile of the Sons of Uisnech, Derdriu sees her foster-father killing a calf in the snow, and a raven coines to drink the blood. So Derdriu wishes she may have a lover as white as the snow, as 1^, red as the blood, and as black as the raven. The Welsh \ version tells how " Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night, and in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the blood. And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to him." It is instructive to note how utterly wanting the earlier version is in the romance and " natural magic " of the later one. In the Old English poetry almost everything is re- versed : the minute descriptions, the elaborate com- parisons, the gorgeous colouring of Celtic romance are wanting. The absence of the colour-sense is especially striking. Almost the only colour that is mentioned in Old English poetry is green. But when the Old English poets talk of " the green earth," they never contrast it, as a modern poet would do, with the blue sky. The colour blue, indeed, is only mentioned once in Old English poetry. What pleased our ancestors in green fields and budding trees was not so much the beauty of the colour as its associations with fertility and plenty SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 275 green with them meant "verdant." The only other colour that is at all frequent in Old English poetry is white. Here again the word does not so much suggest the specific colour white as the general idea of " bright- ness " : a " white helmet " is a shining helmet of bronze. In the Scandinavian mythology Balder is "the whitest of the gods," that is, the fairest, the most beautiful. It is characteristic of the Celts that with them red was the " beautiful " colour, the word derg having both meanings in Old Irish. The defective colour-sense of the Old Teutons is still seen in their descendants — the modern Germans. Dr. Abel in one of his linguistic essays speaks with wonder of the keen perception of delicate shades of colour shown by English ladies in shopping, and contrasts it with the duller perception of his own countrywomen, notiag also the poverty of the German language in expressing dis- tinctions of colour. All English people, too, are struck by the poor and hard colouring of German landscape painters. But the Dutch, who are quite as pure Teutons as the Germans, make the same criticism. They attribute the finer colour-sense of their own painters to the richer colour of their watery meadows and the varying hues of sky and cloud seen only in damp climates. May not similar causes have produced similar effects in England as well .'' In other words, may not the delicate colour- sense shown by the modern English painters and poets have been developed through climatic influences inde- pendently of any supposed Celtic influence or Celtic ancestry } Inferior as the Old English literature is to the Celtic in vivid colouring and richness of detail, it surpasses it in many of the higher flights of imagination : it soars into regions inaccessible to the quick-witted, but more superficial Celt. The moral force and earnestness, the restless enterprise of the old Teutons stamped itself indelibly on their literature. In the Seafarer — that most startlingly modern of all the Old English poems — the approach of spring, when the earth's bosom becomes fair again, and the groves resume their flowers, inspires the youth with no tranquil joy or dreamy voluptuous- T 2 276 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. ness, but with a longing to venture on the sea, and, like Shelley's Alastor, '' to meet lone Death on the' drear ocean's waste." The song of the cuckoo is to him even as the voice of the ill-omened raven : it bodes bitter heart-sorrow. It is interesting to compare the Seafarer with Alastor. Alastor braves death in despair of other- wise attaining his ideal of love and beauty ; he lives in an atmosphere of sublime but unhealthy sentiment. His gentleness, his beauty have something feminine about them. The Seafarer, on the other hand, is all manliness and energy. He casts back many a longing glance at the joys of earth ; but neither the love of woman nor the sweet sound of the harp, nor the joyous revelry of his beloved kinsmen avail aught against the mighty impulse within him : " My mind departs out of my breast like a sea-bird, screams in its lonely flight, returns to me, fierce and eager, impels me irresistibly over the wide waste of waters, over the whale's path."^ The landscape sense was highly developed among our Old English ancestors. Nothing in literature is more vivid than the passages in Beotvidf which describe the "secret land" haunted by the monster Grendel, with its misty headlands, its " wolf-slopes," and the dread lake with fire gleaming in its depths, overhung with icy trees — "a joyless wood." The sense of awe and weirdness is heightened by one of those touches peculiar to Old English poetry : " when the heath-stalking stag seeks that wood, hard-pressed by the hounds, he will give up his life on the shore sooner than plunge in and hide his head." The elegiac mood predominates in the Old English descriptions of nature : the desolation of exile, the sad thoughts of departed glory called forth by the sight of ancient ruins — these are the favourite motives of their lyric poets. Nor are purely idyllic descriptions wanting, such as the beautiful one of the ideal happy island inhabited by the Phoenix, which reminds us partly of Tennyson's description of " the island-valley of Avilion," 1 Compare Shelley in Laoti and Cythna, 2, 29 : " Her spirit o'er the ocean's floating state From her deep eyes far wandering, on the wing Of visions that were mine, beyond its utmost spring." SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 277 partly of Shelley's ideal island in the Euganean Hills with its "windless bowers," "far from passion, pain, and guilt." Shelley's description of the imagined ruins of Venice in the same poem, with the sea-mew flying above, and the palace gate " toppling o'er the abandoned sea," recalls as strikingly that aspect of Old English lyric poetry represented by The Wanderer and the im- pressive fragment known as TJie Ruin — really a descrip- tion of the ruins of the Roman city of Bath. Shelley heightens the effect, almost as \n Beownlf, by "the fisher on his watery way, wandering at the close of day," hastening to pass the gloomy shore " Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o'er the starlight deep, Lead a rapid masque of death O'er the waters of his path." The " natural magic " of such a description as this is — or at least, might be — wholly English, wholly Teutonic — strange as such an assertion may seem to a critic like Mr. Arnold, whose ideas of the Teutonic spirit are gained from a one-sided contemplation of modern German literature at a period when it was still strug- gling for the mastery of the rudiments of style and technique, lost in the barbarism of the Thirty Years' War. Shelley's poem TJie Question, is, on the other hand, as purely Celtic both in its colour-pictures of " green cow-bind " and the " moonlight-coloured may," and "flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, fairer than any wakened eyes behold," and its ethereal unreality and delicate, fanciful sentiment. It need hardly be said that this " Celtic note" in Shelley no more proves Celtic race-influence than the "Greek note" in Keats proves that Keats was of Greek descent. Shelley looks at nature with the same eyes as an old Celtic poet because both were inspired by the same sky and earth, both loved the same flowers, fields, and forests. Divergent as the Celtic and Teutonic literatures are, there is yet a certain affinity between them which comes out clearly when we contrast them with the southern literatures of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France, 278 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. To any one coming fresh from the northern literatures, Greek poetry, with all its greater clearness, moderation, and harmony, has a certain want of picturesqueness — a sobriety of imagination which sometimes approaches to tameness and baldness. Greek poets show but little of that command of the weird and supernatural which impresses us above all in the old Icelandic literature, and has been so powerfully rendered by Gray in his paraphrase. The Descent of Odin. Homer's gods and goddesses are merely human beings on a slightly larger scale ; his account of Ulysses' journey to the infernal regions stirs in us no emotions of awe or mystery. vEschylus' description of the Furies in the Eunienides is equally wanting in the true supernatural touch, and he only falls into the horrible and repulsive when he tells us that " from their eyes drips loathsome gore." Shelley's description of the Furies in his Pi-ometJieiis is nobler and more impressive. The same tendency to confound the loathsome with the impressive may be seen in modern French literature, especially in Balzac — the father of modern " realism." This characteristic difference between the imaginations of northern and southern nations is no doubt due to the difference of climate. The " misty moors " of the poet of Beoztmlf, the gloomy skies and long winter nights of the north are enough to explain the trait of weirdness common to Celtic and Teutonic literature without any hypothesis of influence on either side. Shelley says of his Witch of Atlas (JV. of A. y8) that it is " A tale more fit for the weird winter nights Than for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see." Both Celtic and Teutonic literature show the weak side of their peculiar power in a tendency to exaggerate the gigantic into the formless — a tendency which is strongly opposed to the moderation and self-restraint of Greek art. In the Old Irish tales we have the shadowy, only half corporeal, monsters which come forth at night from the lakes, being in fact nothing but per- sonifications of mist and cloud. In Old English poetry we have the gigantic figure of Grendel looming indis- SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 279 tinctly through the mists. Such creations would be impossible in the sunny south, except among the deserts of Arabia, whose gloomy, solitary wastes, swept by storms of dust, explain the striking analogy there is between the Teutonic and Semitic imagination. Chaucer. If we turn now to the great English poet of the Middle period — Chaucer — we are struck by the complete break there is between Old and Middle English poetry — a break which is shown not least in the treatment of nature. Social and political progress, together with the over- whelming influence of French models, had the same effect in England as elsewhere : nature receded more and more into the background. It is true that through- out Middle English literature there is much appreciation of the gladness and brightness of nature, but there is generally little individuality in the expression of these feelings : the poet contents himself with repeating some simple formula about the fresh flowers and singing birds. Still, there are in Middle English literature several examples to the contrary, such as the thirteenth century poem of The Owl and Nightingale. Many passages, too, in Chaucer show the minutest observation of nature. But bright and clear as these pictures are — as in the tale of Chanticleer — they have lost the magic touch of the older poetry : there is nothing in Chaucer to remind us of Beowulf or the Seafarer ; and when he shows any touches of Celtic fancy, he is only availing himself of the common, literary heritage of his period. Chaucer, with his strong human sympathies, had little love for wild nature. He cared not to stray far beyond the habitations of men. He loves gardens and " flowery green meadows." His ideal forest, as described in The Death of Blanche, is very different from Shelley's ideal forest in Alastor ; Chaucer's forest, with its tall trees of the uniform height of forty or fifty fathoms, symmetri- cally disposed ten or twelve feet apart, comes nearer our idea of a rather formal park than that of a forest. His 28o SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. enumeration of the trees in the Parliavient of Birds is characteristic of the purely human point of view from which he regarded nature, each tree being distinguished, not by its own attributes, but solely with reference to the use made of it by man : — " The byldere ok ; and ek the hardy assh ; The piler ehii, the cofre unto careyne ; The boxtre pipere ; holm to whippes lassh ; The saylynge fyr ; the cipresse, deth to pleyne ; The shetere ew ; the asp, for shaftes pleyne ; The olyve of pes ; and ek the dronke vyne ; The victor palm ; the laurer, to devyne." Compare Shelley, in Alastor, 431 : — " The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching, frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang, Tremulous and pale." A sharper contrast cannot be imagined. Spenser and Shakespere. Leaving the Middle Ages behind, we come now to the first great poet of the Renascence — Spenser. There is little that is original or distinctive in his nature-poetry. He was, of course, a great imitator of Chaucer, and in a passage of the Faerie Queeti (i. i, 8) he has fol- lowed Chaucer's above-quoted description of the trees very closely, but with some significant alterations and additions : " The sailing pine ; the cedar proud and tall ; The vine-prop elm ; the poplar never dry ; The builder oak, sole king of forests all ; The aspen good for staves ; the cypress funeral "... Here the oak is no longer regarded solely from the point of view of a speculative builder who has just purchased " a well-timbered residential estate," but a descriptive epithet is added, and so with many of the other trees. SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 281 Shakespere's attitude towards nature is much the same as Chaucer's, allowing, of course, for the greater range and depth of Shakespere's genius. Wherever his subject requires it, he shows an unlimited command not only of minutely accurate and vivid descriptions of nature, but also of the subtle charm of Celtic — we should rather say, Welsh — romance. But even in his non-dramatic poetry there are few traces of what may be called a disinterested love of inanimate nature. Nature with him is always a means to an end : either to heighten human emotion, or as supplying materials for those far-reaching similes and metaphors in which his restless intellect delighted. To us, trained by Wordsworth and Shelley to regard nature with reverer^ce even in her humblest manifesta- tions, there is something startling in Shakespere's ir- reverent familiarity. No poet of the present century would speak of the clouds or of night ^ as Shakespere does in such passages as these : " Full many a glorious morning have I seen . . . Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face." {Sonnet xxxiii.) " To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way, Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke." {Sonnet \xx\v.) " Which, hke a jewel hung in ghastly night, Makes black night beauteous and her old face new." {Sofiiiet xxvii.) " And see the brave day sunk in hideous night." {Sonnet xii.) 1 Though Shakespere's main view of night is of its blackness or hideousness, yet he has passages to the contrary, as in the Merchant of Vetiice, V. i. 56 — 63 : " Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica ! Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ! There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdst, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims : Such harmony is in immortal souls." See too Juliet's ' blessed night,' and remember Marlowe's " Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ! " 282 SHELLEY'S NATURE- POETRY. Compare Spenser {F. Q., i. 5, 20). " Where grisly night, with visnge deadly sad, That Phoebus' cheerful face durst never view, And in a foul black pitchy mantle clad . . , And coalblack steeds yborn of hellish brood." Shakespere had nothing of that feeling which made Wordsworth exclaiin " The world is too much with us ! " ^ or prompted Shelley's Invitation : " Away, away, from men and towns, To tire wild woods and the downs — To the silent wilderness, Where the soul need not repress Its music, lest it should not find An echo in another's mind, While the touch of nature's art Harmonises heart to heart." It is curious to note that though the last two lines are a paraphrase of Shakespere's " One touch of nature," the sentiment they convey is one which would be utterly unintelligible to Shakespere himself. In Shakespere's time there was, indeed, no antagonism between art and nature, between town and country,^ To Shakespere, a street in a town was as much a piece of nature as a glade in a forest, and to him there was no incongruity in associating the two ideas together, as * Compare Sonnet Ixvi. : " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry . . . Tired with all these, from these would I be gone." ^ I admit that in Scene iii. Act III. of Cymbeliite is a good deal on the antagonism between town and country ; but not in my sense : it is the contrast of the ' quiet life ' of the country with the ' sharper,' pushing, intriguing life of the town, like the Duke's ; " Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court?" {As You Like It, II. i.) So Touchstone's contrast is of rustic dulness with court amuse- ments; As You Like It, III. i. See also Caxton's Curial (from Alain Chartier's French), and the discussion " C'f cyuile and vn-cyuile Life," or The English Courtier and the Country-Gentleman, 1586: Roxbiirghe Library, 1868. SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 283 when {A. Y. L. I., ii. i) he calls the deer in the forest, " Native burghers of this desert city." Hence also Shakespere saw no incongruity in making heaven " peep through the blanket of the dark," which to a modern reader has a downright ludicrous effect. Akin to this freedom is Shakespere's lavish use of that bold, imaginative hyperbole in which he is unsurpassed : "The sky, it seems, would pour do\%'n stinking pitch, But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek, Dashes the fire out." {T. i. 2.) " The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds ; The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane, Seems to cast water on the burning bear And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole." {0th. ii. i.) A nineteenth century poet has to be more scrupulous. The mild hyperbole of such a passage as Shelley's Laon and CytJina, 3, 12 — " Upon that rock a mighty column stood . . . . . . o"er its height to fly Scarcely the cloud, the vulture, or the blast. Has power." shows the limits which he cannot transgress without the imputation of plagiarism, or imitation of the Elizabethan style. Milton. The essential continuity between Chaucer and Shake- spere in the treatment of nature makes the gap between Shakespere and Milton all the more striking. Milton was, indeed, far in advance of his age in this respect. As the Puritans anticipated the political and social changes of the eighteenth century, so also did the great Puritan poet anticipate its nature-poetry. Milton's L Allegro and // Penseroso are, indeed, not only the first examples in modern English poetry of what the Ger- mans call stimniungsbilder, "mood-pictures," but they have served as models up to the present day. These poems are the first conscious attempts in English litera- 284 SHELLEY'S NATURE POETRY. turc to embody in words the subtle impressions we receive from solitary communion with nature. So per- fect is the poet's command of these "nature-moods" that he is not contented with taking some phase of nature, and tracing the emotions excited by it, but reverses the process: he takes some one emotion — such as melancholy — and calls up at will from external nature everything that contributes to the effect he is aiming at. Most wonderful of all is the way in which every emotion is heightened or toned down into harmony with the rest of the picture by subtle contrast with its opposite. In the bright, hot noontide we are led into shady forests ; in the calm stillness of night our thoughts are directed to the lights of heaven and the busy stir of human life.^ In Milton's poetry we see the sense of landscape fully developed for the first time. He is, indeed, the first English poet to employ the word "landscape" in its present sense (in L' Allegro) : " Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures, Whilst the landscape round it measures." As the constituents of the landscape he enumerates lawns, fallows, mountains, meadows, brooks, rivers, to- gether with towers and battlements. The inclusion of these last reminds us that "landscape" was originally a technical term of the Dutch painters, used to designate the background and other accessories in a figure-piece. The vv^ord "scenery" was in like manner borrowed from the technical language of the stage ; it does not seem to have come into general use till the beginning of the next century. Exquisite as Milton's sense of beauty is, it is cold- blooded — rather that of a poetic epicure than an enthusiast. To him a beautiful landscape is a beautiful landscape, and nothing more. He has but little of the " sheer inimitable Celtic note " that Mr. Arnold finds in Shakespere, nor on the other hand does his nature- poetry show anything of the moral earnestness of Wordsworth, or the rapt ecstasy of Shelley. ^ Brandl : Coleridge, p. 33. SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 2S5 Eighteenth Century. In the eighteenth century the poetry of nature is enriched and deepened by two new factors, one moral, the other intellectual. It was then that the hard, narrow puritanism of Milton expanded into a new spirit of humanity and philanthropy, whose influence in poetry we see steadily widening up to the time of Shelley. In '^WX'^orvs L Allegro the ploughman -'whist- ling o'er the furrowed land " is simply part of a picture ; in Gray's Elegy the ploughman as he " homeward plods his weary way " is an object of pity and sympathy : the hardships of the poor, and sympathy with their lot are henceforth sources of poetic emotion. As the century advanced, the circle of sympathy is widened to include suffering animals as well as human beings. Another characteristic feature of the century is the love of chil- dren, and the growth of the family affections — both of which are conspicuously absent from Shakespere's poetry. The intellectual tendencies of the eighteenth century were at first unfavourable to the development of poetic imagination. But the simplicity, clearness, and direct- ness of thought and expression achieved by Pope and his school, the patient, plodding accuracy of Thomson's descriptions of nature, were necessary links in the chain of development; and when Gray had turned back to seek fresh inspiration in the nature-poetry of Milton, the ground was fully prepared for a Coleridge, a Words- worth, and a Shelley.* In another way, too. Gray was ' a pioneer, in advance not only of his own age, but also of the present one — in his attempts to popularise such of the masterpieces of northern poetry, both Celtic and Scandinavian, as were accessible to him. Although Gray never succeeded in shaking off the false rhetoric of his age, he knew instinctively where to seek the antidote. The most striking feature of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century is the rapid development of the natural sciences, and their popularisation towards the end of the century. In our days the practical applica- 286 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. tions and consequent utilitarian associations of science have somewhat deadened us to the imaginative element in it, and made it a little difficult for us to realise the enthusiasm which the electrical and chemical discoveries of such men as Franklin, Priestley, and Davy roused even among the most frivolous of their contemporaries. « One inevitable result of that growth of large towns which went hand in hand with increased material pros- perity, was the development of an antagonism between town and country life which soon began to express itself in literature. This antagonism showed itself in two opposite forms. In the beginning of the century it took the form of a cultured contempt for the boorishness and intellectual narrowness and stagnation of country life. This feeling lasted through the whole century down to the beginning of the present one, and was especially persistent among the literary critics, until their opposition was broken down by the triumph of Wordsworth and the Lake School. But in the latter half of the century the antagonism between town and country took the opposite form of a revolt against the artificiality and insincerity of town life. On the Continent the return to nature was elevated into a religion, and preached as a gospel by Rousseau. In England, where art had never so completely lost touch with nature as on the Continent, the new tenden- cies worked themselves out in a more moderate and practical spirit. For our present purpose it is especially important to note the reform in gardening and laying out parks, which aimed at following instead of distorting nature, as in the older Italian style. From England it spread to the Continent. The park at Munich is still called "the English garden." The eighteenth century landscape-gardening certainly paved the way for that love of wild nature which became general towards the end of the century. This love of wild nature, which was greatly popularised by the romances of Mrs. Radclifte and her school — in which crime, mystery, brigands, ruined castles, and primeval forests are delightfully jumbled together — showed itself in an appreciation of the rugged scenery SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 287 of mountains and moors, and a delight in open and solitary space, however barren and desolate — feelings which often developed into an austere love of barrenness and desolation for their own sake. All these are feelings which would have been un- intelligible to Shakespere and his contemporaries. It is very doubtful if Shakespere would have seen any beauty in Keats's picture of " The new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors ; " and it is certain he would not have sympathised with Shelley's feeling {Julian and Maddalo, 14) : " I love all waste And solitary places ; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless as we wish our souls to be." So far from seeing any beauty in moorland, Shake- spere singles it out for especial contempt : " Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long [ling.^J heath, brown [broom.'] furze, any- thing." (r.,i. 1.) To be blown about in winds,^ which to us moderns is rather an exhilarating idea than otherwise, is to him the awfullest doom that superstition can imagine ; " To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world." {M. M., iii. i.) " Whip me, ye devils. From the possession of this heavenly sight ! Blow me about in winds ! " {Oih., v. 2.) 1 I do not forget "The merry wind Blows off the shore " in the Comedy of Errors, IV., i. 90, 91 ; or Prospero's promise to Ariel : " Thou shalt be as free As mountain winds." {Tempest, I. ii. 497-8.) 288 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. It is instructive to compare the nearest parallel pas- sage in Shelley {Cenci, v. 4, 57), which may, indeed, easily be a reminiscence of those quoted above : "Sweet heaven, forgive weak thoughts ! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world ; The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world ! " Similar passages in Shelley are : " Shall we therefore find No refuge in this merciless wide world?" {Cenci, \. 3, 106.) " Sheltered by the warm embrace of thy soul From hungry space." {Prom., iv. 479.) It is evident that the modern poet's conception of desolation and negation has to be made more abstract : he cannot bring in anything so concrete as blowing winds. It need hardly be said that this love of the wilder aspects of nature was of slow growth, and was only gradually evolved out of the primitive emotions of awe and fear. Indeed when we find eighteenth-century tourists dwelling on the awful wildness and horrible desolation of the Derbyshire Peak or the Cheddar Cliffs — scenery which most of us, spoilt by the Alps and Pyrenees, would consider rather tame and mild — we are inclined to take them too literally, and to forget that in that self-conscious age people were apt to accentuate their newly-found pleasure in the sublime by a little occasional exaggeration, just as the luxurious tourist of the present day likes to dwell on the mostly imaginary hardships of " roughing it." But it must also be remembered that throughout the eighteenth century travelling at the best was never free from hardship and danger, and that every heath and waste place was associated with traditions of crime and violence. These associations would naturally linger even after their causes had ceased to exist. SHELLE F'5 NA TURE-POE TR V. Shelley's Characteristics. To all these manifold influences of the century of his birth Shelley was acutely sensitive, and they are all re- flected in his poetry. The question, how far he suc- ceeded in giving poetical expression to the social and political ideals of his age, and whether his poetry, as poetry, benefited or not thereby, is one which does not concern us here. There can, on the other hand, be no doubt that his enthusiastic studies in philosophy and natural science — superficial as the latter were, were an essential factor in his poetic development, especially as regards his poetry of nature. Not that he was in any way a cross between a poet and a man of science. Shelley was no Jules Verne — he was not even a Plato. The real work of his life was poetry ; although it is possible that had he lived longer he would, like Coleridge, have turned more and more to philosophy, if indeed, he had not taken to practical politics. But poet as he was, he was above all an intellectual — we might almost say, a scientific — poet. Akin to the intellectual temperament — though unfor- tunately not always associated with it — is the love of truth. This Shelley had in a high degree. He had, J above all, the virtue of intellectual honesty — a rare virtue everywhere, and especially rare^mong practical- minded, compromise-loving Englishmen. To Shelley a thinker who was afraid to go the whole length of his intellectual tether was as contemptible as any other kind of coward. He himself showed his rare combination of intellectual and moral strength in the fearless consistence with which he carried out his principles in whatever regions of theory or practice they led him into. His strength of character was shown not less strikingly in the resolutely agnostic attitude he took on subjects which he believed to be beyond human ken. He was not the man to seek consolation, as John Stuart Mill advises us to do, in the cultivation of religious beliefs which our reason refuses to sanction ; while on the other hand he was equally free from the dogmatism with which many U 290 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. philosophers and men of science have attempted to define the boundaries of the knowable and unknowable. Hence the vagueness with which, both in his poetry and prose, he has expressed himself on such questions as the existence of a Deity and the immortality of the soul. Hence also the want of any one central view of nature in his poetry. I do not understand why Mr, Stopford: Brooke attributes this feature of Shelley's philosophy and poetry to a supposed love of the vague and indefinite for their own sake. I find no trace of indefiniteness in Shelley's expression of his views on those questions of philosophy, religion, art, morality, and politics which are within the range of human intel- lect. On the contrary, they form a gospel of life as definite as it is consistent and comprehensive. If Shelley refuses to commit himself to Wordsworth's belief that " Every flower Enjoys the air it breathes," or to model all his poetry on the lines of a definite sys- tematic pantheism, it is simply because he did not con- sider such beliefs to be capable of proof or disproof in the present state of our knowledge, and therefore con- tented himself with vague indications of his pantheistic leanings, cautiously expressed, as in the conclusion of the Invitation : — "And all things seem only one In the universal Sun." Another aspect of Shelley's intellectual temperament is its ideality and tendency to abstraction. This ten- dency is shown even more in his delineation of human character and action than in his treatment of nature. His treatment of human nature is rarely sympathetic. The sensitiveness of his organisation made him shrink with feminine horror from all cruelty and violence, and his clear, truthful intellect made him impatient of injus- tice, hypocrisy, and conventionality. But somehow his impassioned philanthropy fails to touch our hearts. His enthusiasm is not contagious : it dazzles our imagina- tion, but it leaves us cold. Shelley is singularly wanting SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 291 in pathos, except in a few cases where he is drawing directly on his own emotions and experience, or giving an idealised portrait of himself, as in Alastor or the song of the third spirit in the first act of Prouietheus (" I sat beside a sage's bed " . . .), in both of which the pathos ; is inspired by this very want of sympathy — by the poet's sense of his own loneliness and isolation from his fellow men. Even when he descends from the lofty heights of abstract philanthropy to express sympathy or pity for some one human being, as in Adonais and Epipsychidion, the frigid emotion contrasts painfully with the brilliance of his imagery. The only burst of warm spontaneous feeling in these two poems is the self-pity with which he describes himself in Adonais. Shelley's incapacity to realise a character distinct from his own is shown not least in that one of his creations which at first sight seems most vigorously objective — Count Cenci. In creating a character Shelley had only two alternatives : either to reproduce himself, or to create an abstraction. In the present case he is obliged to adopt the latter alternative : Count Cenci is an abstraction. Indeed, so completely is he an abstraction that we fail to realise him as a moral agent at all — as far, at least, as Shelley's presentment of him is concerned : we know, from the plot of the story, that he is a villain, but Shelley certainly does not help us to realise it. The villains of real life or of Shakespere's dramas are a mixture of good and bad ; ofte'n they are strong and noble natures with some apparently insignificant warp of fate or character ; and they generally have some motive for their crimes or follies. But Shelley's Count Cenci is wholly bad, and his conduct is wholly without motive. Shelley's idea of constructing a villain was to combine every imaginable depravity into one abstraction. Shelley's Count Cenci is really a personification of blind destructiveness : from this point of view it would be almost as absurd to call him a villain, as it would be to attribute villainy to a ravening tiger or a devastating whirlwind : he is not a psycho- logical, but what might be called an " elemental " villain. Shelley's real sympathies are with inanimate nature. ' Here he is at home. Here he is unique and supreme. He is indeed " the poet of nature " in a truer sense than U 2 292 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. Wordsworth is. Wordsworth is really the poet of the homely, the common-place in nature as in man. What- ever in nature harmonises with his own narrow sym- pathies he assimilates and reproduces with a power all his own. But whenever nature refuses to lend herself to his moral lessons and similes, he does not scruple to lecture and bully her. He is very severe on the clouds. He patronises the stock-dove — " that was the song, the song for me!" — and snubs the nightingale. Even the daisy gets an occasional rap on the knuckles, and is told not to be too conceited. His human sympathies are equally limited. He loves little girls and old men, and dotes on idiots, but ignores boys and old women, and detests men of science — " philosophers " as he calls them. His sympathies in inanimate nature are mainl}' confined to a limited group of concrete objects — mainly birds and flowers ; he cares little for the phenomena of nature. Shelley, on the other hand, seeks to penetrate into the very heart of nature in all her manifestations, without regard to their association with human feeling. While in his treatment of man he is all subjectivity, in his treatment of- nature he is often purely objective. In such a poem as The Cloud, there is not only rio trace of, Wordsworthian egotism, but the whole description of the cloud is as remote from human feeling as it could well be, consistently with the poetic necessity for per- sonification : the cloud is personified, but it is personified^ as abstractly as possible. As Mr. Brooke says : " Strip off the imaginative clothing from The Cloitd, and science will support every word of it." The range of Shelley's sympathies is bounded only by the universe itself. He combines forests, mountains, rivers, and seas into vast ideal landscapes ; he dives into the depths of the earth, soars among clouds and storms, and communes " with the sphere of sun and moon." Shelley has a strong sense of structure. Mr. Brooke speaks of his pleasure in " the intricate, changeful, and incessant weaving and unweaving of Nature's life in a great forest." Nothing, indeed, is more characteristic of Shelley's mind than his constant use of this very word SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 293 "weave." The passage just quoted' from Mr, Brooke's essay seems to have been suggested by Shelley's words in Rosalind and Helen (128) : " Through the intricate wild wood A maze of life and light and motion Is woven." The following examples, grouped roughly under heads, will illustrate Shelley's varied use of the words weave and woof : Leaves : " A hall . . . o'er whose roof Fair chnging weeds with ivy pale did grow, Clasping its gtey rents with a verdurous woof, A hanging dome of leaves, a canopy moon-proof." (Z. and C, 6, 27.) " A wood Whose bloom-inwoven leaves now scattering fed The hungry storm." {L. and C, 6, 46.) "'Beneath a woven grove it sails." {Alastor, 401.) " The woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day." {Alas tor, 445.) " The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path." {Alastor, 426.) This last is a transition to the fifth head. Clouds : " The blue sky ... Fretted with many a fair cloud interwoven." (Z,. afid C, I, 4.) " The woof of those white clouds." {L. and C, i, 5.) " Through the woof of spell-inwoven clouds." (Z. and C, 1, 52.) " As the burning threads of woven cloud Unravel in pale air." {Prom., il I, 23.) The mists of night entwining their dim woof." (Z. and C, 5, 53.) Wind : "The sinuous veil of woven wind." {Alastor, 176.) Water : "... there shone the emerald beams of heaven, Shot through the lines of many waves inwoven." (Z. and C, 7, II.) 294 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. Light and colour : "Winds which feed on sunrise woven." (Z. a7id C, 5, 44.) " The bright air . . . did weave intenser hues." (Z. and C, 3, 3.) " Like rainbows woven there [in the air]." {L. ajid C, 6, 55.) " The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove." {Cloud, 71.) " The moon . . . With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed To mingle." {A las tor, 646.) " Where ebon pines a shade under the starlight wove." (Z. a7td C, 3, 34.) " Till twilight o'er the east wove her serenest wreathe." (Z. a;/d C, 6, 17.) Sound : " When the warm air weaves, among the fre'sh lea\es, Soft music." (/?. and H., 58S.) " Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought ; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues." {Alastcr, 153.) " But now, oh weave the mystic measure Of music, and dance, and shapes of light, Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure. Like the clouds and sunbeams unite." {Prom.,4,y'/.) Language : " He knew his soothing words to weave with skill." (Z. and C, 4, 6.) " A woof of happy converse frame." (Z. and C, 5, 54.) " Weaving swift language from impassioned themes." (Z. and C.,6, i.) " Hymns which my soul had woven to freedom." (Z. and C, 2, 28.) " Woven hymns of night and day." {Alastor, 48.) " In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty." {To IVordsworth, Forman, i. 27.) It is remarkable that the phrase " to weave a hymn " is frequent in the Veda Thought and feeling : " Unconscious of the power through which she wrought The woof of such intelligible thought." (Z. and C, 2, 34.) SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 295 *' And though the woof of wisdom I know well To dye in hues of language." (Z. afid C, 4, 17.) " Yet in my hollow looks and withered mien The likeness of a shape for which was braided The brightest woof of genius, still was seen." {L. and C. 4, 30.) " Their [the Greek women's] eyes could have entangled no heart in soul-inwoven labyrinths." {On Love.) Time : " A . . . speech with pauses woven among." {L. and C, 5, 52.) Existence : " The web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea." {Adonat's, 54.) Movement and action : "... a lake whose waters wove their play Even to the threshold of that lonely home." ♦ (Z. and C, 4, 3.) '•' Weave the dance." (From., 4, 69.) " Woven caresses." {R. and H., 1031 ; Prom., 4, 105.) " The implicated orbits woven Of the wide-wandering stars." {Prom., 2, 4, 87.) Cause, make : " Their will has wove the chains that eat their hearts." (L. and C, 4, 26.) Have woven all the wondrous imagery Of this dim spot which mortals call the world." {Earth Spirit, Forman, ii. 103.) " She unwove the wondrous imagery Of second childhood's swaddling-bands." {\V. of A. ,70.) The passage first quoted {torn Rosalind ajid Helen dilso comes under this head. It is noticeable that in the more famiUar style of the Letter to Maria Gisborne (6, 154), Shelley uses spin instead of weave : " I ... sit spinning still round this decaying form, From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought — No net of words in garish colours wrought. . . . But a soft cell, where when that fades away, Memory may clothe in wings my living name." 296 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. " We spun A shroud of talk to hide us trum the sun Of this famihar hfe." In a passai^e already quoted {L. and C, 4, 30) he sub- stitutes braid for the sake of the rhyme. So also in Laoii and Cytlina, 5, 24 : " She stood beside him like a rainbow braided (: faded) Within some storm." Shelley's love of the changing and fleeting aspects of nature — the interest with which he watched the forma- tion of mist and cloud, and the shifting hues of dawn and sunset — is, like his sense of structure, a natural result of the half scientific spirit with which he regarded nature, for it is in the changing phenomena of nature that her real life lies. According to Mr. Brooke, Shelley's love for the changeful in nature is the result of the in- herent changefulness of his temperament. But of this 1 can see but little in his life. He was impulsive enough — for without impulsiveness he would hardly have been a poet — but not fickle or undecided in his feelings and principles : there was in him nothing of that swaying to and fro between two extremes, which we see not only in self-seeking politicians, but in sincere enthusiasts as well. Mr. Brooke himself admits that Shelley " loved deeply a few great conceptions," adding, however, that he " wearied almost immediately of any special form in which he embodied them." But the other critics would hardly agree with this view. Mr. Salt, in his Shelley Primer (^. 41), remarks that "the repetition of certain images and words is one of Shelley's most marked characteristics," giving numerous examples. Shelley's Mythoi-ogy. Shelley's love of natural phenomena sometimes shows itself in naive expressions of delight, and simple com- parisons which remind us of the nature-poetry of the Veda. Thus in The Witch of Atlas, 27 : " Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is — Each flame of it is as a precious stone Dissolved in ever-moving light." SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 297 In the Veda, Agni, the fire-god, is described as a beautiful, golden-haired youth, adorned like a wooer with many colours, equally beautiful on all sides, with his face turning every way at once. The description of fire in his Prometheus (ii. 4, 66) shows how Shelley could pass at will from the primitive Ar}^an to the modern point of view : " He tamed fire, which, like some beast of prey, Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath The frown of man." The most effective way of dealing poetically with the forces of nature is, of course, to personify them. All poets feel this. All poets are, therefore, more or less mythologists. But their personifications assume very different forms, according to the circumstances which surround them and the nature of their own genius. With the ancient Hindu poets the personification of the powers of nature was so direct and spontaneous that, although associated with religious feelings, it had hardly- developed into mythology. Even when they call Agni the " golden-haired youth " or the " messenger to the gods," they never let us forget that these names are simply figurative expressions for " fire." It is quite otherwise in a fully developed mythology, such as that of the Greeks and Romans, or our own Teutonic fore- fathers. Zeus, Jupiter, Woden, and the rest of them were distinct personalities hardly distinguishable from human beings, whose connection with the powers of nature could only be realised with an effort, if at all No Greek could have guessed that Athene was a per- sonification of the lightning, though he would have had no great difficulty in identifying her father Zeus wnth the sky. The traditional personifications of Greek mythology became, of course, more and more fossilised as they were handed on to the Roman poets, and from them to the poets of the Middle Ages and Renascence, until at last such figures as "bluff Boreas" became mere verbal nonentities, and "Flora" survived only as a scientific term. Both Chaucer and Shakespcre are full of this tra- 298 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. ditional mythology. Thus Chaucer has in the Death of Blanche : " For both Flora and Zephirus, They two that make floures growe, Had mad her dwellyng ther, I trovve." And, indeed, he loses no opportunity of displaying his knowledge of classical mythology. Shakespere has in The Tempest (iv., i, and v., i) : " When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are foundered Or Night kept chained below." " Ye elves . . . and ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune." In Shakespere these mythological names are so worn down that he uses them simply as synonyms : Neptune with him is the sea, and nothing more. Even Wordsworth still shows traces of the old-fashioned conventional mythology : " Blithe Flora from her couch upstarts, For May is on the lawn." " When Sol was destined to endure That darkening of his radiant face." It is characteristic of Shelley that he has no trace of this conventional mythology. He never brings in the figures of classical mythology incidentally, but only when they are the subject of his poetry, and his hand- ling of them in such cases is always fresh and original, as in his Hymn to Apollo — the most perfect reproduction of the spirit of Greek mythology that we have in modern literature. His conception of Jupiter in his Prometheus is quite new and original : he makes him the personi- fication of all that hinders the free development of the human mind, which latter is personified by Prometheus. We see, then, that even where Shelley is trammelled by traditional mythology, he reveals something of that " myth-making " faculty in which he stands alone among modern poets — the only one who at all approaches him in this respect being his contemporary, the Swedish poet Stagnelius. When Shelley is free to follow his own SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 299 fancy, he instinctively creates nature-myths of a strangely primitive type, unlike anything in Greek or the other fully developed mythologies, but showing remarkable similarity to the personifications of the Veda. Shelley himself says in his preface to the Prometlieiis : " The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespere are full of instances of the same kind : Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power ; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute this singularity." Modestly as Shelley here speaks of his own originality — of whose extent he was probably unconscious — he clearly hints that his power of personification is not entirely the result of the study of Greek mythology, but contains elements of original fancy. Although no one has hitherto taken the trouble to point out in detail the analogy between Shelley's per- sonifications of nature and those embedded in primitive mythologies, yet most of his critics have not failed to see in this one of the characteristic features of his genius. Mr. Symonds says in his Shelley: "We feel ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while we read the description of Oceanus, and the raptures of the earth and moon [in Prometheus Unbound]." Mr. Stopford Brooke says : " The little poem on the dawn ["The pale stars are gone . . ."] might have been con- ceived by a primitive Aryan." It is not only Shelley critics who have been struck by this characteristic of his poetry. Mr. Tylor in his Anthropology (p. 290), after remarking that the modern poet "still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense," goes on to quote as an instance the opening lines of Shelley's Queen Mab : " How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother. Sleep ! SHELLE V 'S NA TURE-POE TR Y. One pale as yonder waning moon, With lips of lurid blue ; The other, rosy as the morn When throned on Ocean's wave It blushes o'er the world ; " which he then goes on to analyse : " Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illus- trate the notion of paleness, the dawn of redness ; while to convey the idea of dawn shining on the sea, the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature." One of the best examples of Shelley's myth-making faculty is the little poem, The World's Wanderers i " Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light Speed thee in thy fiery flight, In what cavern of the night Will thy pinions close now ? " Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way, In what depth of night or day Seekest thou repose now ? " Weary wind, who wanderest Like the world's rejected guest, Hast thou still some secret nest On the tree or billow ? " Two of the most striking images in this poem appear also in T/ie Bay of Z^^rzV/ (Forman, ii. 280) : " She left me at the silent time W^hen the moon h:id ceased to climb ' The azure path of Heaven's steep, And like an albatross asleep, Balanced on her ivitigs of light. Hovered in the purple night, Ere she sought her ocean iiest In the chambers of the West." SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY, 301 Compare also " The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose, For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep : Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows ; Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed sleep." {Stanzas, Forman, i. 24.) " When weary meteor lamps repose" {R. and H., 551). " Some star of many a one That climbs and wanders through steep night." {Prom., ii. 2, 14.) " Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth?" . . . {To the Moon, Forman, ii. 225.) It would be possible to parallel the passage about death and sleep from other modern poets — though only imperfectly — but The IVor/cfs Wanderers is as remote as anything- can well be from modern thought and sentiment. Its imagery and its strange un-human pathos are alike primitive and elemental. The same sympathy with the heavenly bodies in their wanderings through space has been expressed by some of the older Greek lyric poets, but the conception of the star's rays as wings can hardly be paralleled outside of the Veda, where, as we have seen (p. 272), the rays of the sun were regarded as the limbs with which it moved through the sky. In the Ode to Heaven, 15 (Forman, i. 441) Shelley has the primitive comparison of a star's rays to hair : " And swift stars with flashing tresses " With which compare Laon and CytJina, 5, 5^^) • "... the oceans Where morning dyes her golden tressses." There are some striking mythological elements in To Night, although the poem is otherwise quite modern and subjective. Death is here the brother of Night, who is the father of Sleep, the " sweet, filmy-eyed child." The image of Night emerging from the " misty Eastern cave " of sunset, with which Shelley opens the poem, is one which could have occurred to him alone of modern poets. It is frequent in his poetry : " Sun rise from its eastern caves." {R. and H., 541.) 303 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. " The mists in their eastern caves unrolled." {The Boat, i6, Forman, ii. 261.) Compare also "... Hke an autumnal night, that springs Out of the East, and follows wild and drear The golden day." {Adonais, 23.) " When the night is left behind In the deep East, dim and blind." {Invitation, 62.) In The World's Wanderers he asks the star, " In what cavern of the night will thy pinions close now ? " The same image recurs in the next stanza of the same poem : " In what depth of night or day seekest thou repose now } " The image of a cave is also used by Shelley to express the idea of source or cause very strikingly in T/ie Cloud, 82: " And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise." .... Other examples are " Those subtle and fair spirits, Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought." {Prom., 1,658.) " Great spirit whom the sea of boundless thought Nurtures within its unimagined caves." {Invocation, Forman, ii. 267.) With which may be compared . . . . " The responses .... Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul. Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll. {Prom., I, 805.) " Love .... like a storm bursting its cloudy prison With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being." {Pro?n., 4, 378 ) The simile in the third stanza of The World's Wan- derers — " like the world's rejected guest " — appears to have been a favourite one of Shelley's, for it appears SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 303 again in To Night, where it is said of day that he lingered "like an unloved guest." The curious use of the word " nest " in TJie World's Wanderers and TJie Bay of Lerici, which reappears in TJie Recollection, ii. : " The lightest wind was in its nest, The tempest in its home," is perhaps a reminiscence of Wordsworth's " The sun is quenched, the sea-fowl gone to rest. And the wild storm hath somewhere found a nest." In the Veda, the waters, let loose by Indra (p. 307) are compared to birds flying to their nests. It is interesting to compare Milton's description of the moon in U Allegro, 66, with the passages quoted above, and to observe how essentially different his treatment is, in spite of some resemblance in detail : " To behold the wandering moon, Riding near her highest noon. Like one that had been led astray Through the heavens' wide pathless way, And oft as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud." . The leading idea of T/ie World's Wanderers appears also in Shakespere's Vemis and Adonis : " Look, the world's comforter, with weary gait, His day's hot task hath ended in the west." One of the most primitively mythological of Shelley's shorter poems is that on the dawn {Prom., 4, i), already alluded to (p. 299) : " The pale stars are gone ! For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn. Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard." 304 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. In the fragment Insecurity (Forman, ii. 266) the dawn itself is compared to a fawn : "... the young and dewy dawn, Bold as an unhunted fawn, Up the windless heaven has gone." In the Veda the stars flee away like thieves before the all-seeing sun, and the comparison of the sun to a wolf or other ravenous animal is frequent in savage mythologies. Otherwise Shelley's sun-mythology has little that is distinctive about it. Such an epithet as the " all-seeing " sun is the common property of all poets, from those of the Veda down to Shakespere and Shelley. Shelley's comparison of the sun's rays to "shafts" (Z. and C, 3, 20; Prom., iii. 3, 1 18) is also common inythological and poetic property. The slight prominence given to the sun in Shelley's mythology, as compared with its overwhelming pre- dominance in all primitive mythologies, is a characteristic result of the changed feelings with which we moderns regard nature. The old half-utilitarian associations which made sunshine and daylight the most beautiful and glorious of all phenomena, and night and darkness the most terrible and hideous — associations still retained by Shakespere (p. 28j)— has given way to a more refined, more dilettante way of looking at nature, which ignores everything but the beautiful, and finds beauty in the awe and mystery of darkness as well as in the splendour of light. This reaction is carried so far, that a modern poet is able to reverse the old contrast, and to turn with a sigh of relief from the garish day to the " star- inwrought" night. To a modern poet the setting of the sun calls forth none of those painful emotions with which it was asso- ciated in the minds of our savage ancestors, but rather suggests peace, and rest from the toils of the day ; and so^'a modern poet is able to give himself up without reserve to the enjoyment of " Sunset and its gorgeous ministers." In the Veda, which contains whole books of hymns to SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 505 the dawn, there is not a single description of sunset. Even in Chaucer ^ and Shakespere"- there are hardly any detailed descriptions of sunset. In Shelley's poetry, on the other hand, the sunsets get the upper hand. To Shelley, as to the Old-English poets, the sky is " the sun's path " : " She stood beside him like a rainbow braided Within some storm, when scarce its shadows vast From the blue paths of the swift sun have faded.'' (Z.. and C, 5, 24.) Shelley's love of cloudland has often been dwelt on. To him the clouds are the daughters of the sun and the sea, or of earth and water : " Those fair daughters, The clouds, of Sun and Ocean, who have blended The colours of the air since first extended It cradled the young world." (Z. and C, 2, 5.) " Earth and Heaven, The Ocean and the Sun, the clouds their daughters." (Z. and C, 9, 35.) " I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky." {C/oud, 73.) ^ " Parfourmed hath the sonne his ark diourne ; No lenger may the body of him sojourne On th'orisonte, as in that latitude. Night with his mantel, that is derk and rude, Gan oversprede th'emesperie aboute "... is an exception which proves the rule. - Dramatic poetr>' would not admit of elaborate ones. Those that occur are slight. Take two : " The weary sun hath made a golden set, And, by the bright track of his fiery car, Gives signal of a goodly day to-morrow." {Ric/i. IIL IV". iii. 19—21.) " O setting sun, As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night. So in his red blood Cassius' day is set : The sun of Rome is set." {Jul. Casar, V. iii. 63.) 3o6 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. He compares them to sheep, whose shepherd is the wind : " Multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind." {Prom., ii. i, 145.) In the Veda the rain-clouds are regarded as cows with heavy udders. Shelley is fond of comparing clouds to rocks and mountains, towers and walls : " When the north wind congregates in crowds The floating mountains of the silver clouds From the horizon." {Sinniner and Winter, Forman, ii. 209.) " Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid The momentary oceans of the lightning, Or to some toppling promontory proud Of solid tempest whose black pyramid, Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire Before their waves expire ! " {Hellas, 957.) " She would often climb The steepest ladder of the crudded rack Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime." {lV.o/A.,sS-) " Athens arose : a city such as vision Builds from the purple crags and silver towers Of battlemented cloud, as in derision Of kingliest masonry." {Liberty, 5, Forman, i. 454.) "... the clouds, whose moving turrets make The bastions of the storm. ( W. of A., 48.) "... the hollow turrets Of those high clouds." {W. of A., 52.) Such comparisons are common to poets of all ages. The very word " cloud " itself originally meant " rock," a meaning which it kept as late as the thirteenth century. The Old English dud was evidently first applied to the heavy cumulus, and then to clouds generally. In the Veda, cloud-mythology plays a prominent part. The rain-clouds — personified as cows — are supposed to be shut up in the rocky mountains of cloud by the SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 307 demons of drought — the " driers," the " envelopers " or " coverers," the " throttlers " or " dragons," the " misers," etc. The hero-god Indra slays the demons with his thunderbolt, sets the waters free to flow in beneficent streams over the parched earth below, demolishes the "nine and ninety fortresses," and drives out the cows from the caves where they were hidden — with which compare Shelley's "caverns of rain " (p. 302). " The wings of the wind " is a familiar Old Testament metaphor, and is common in most mythologies. Shelley employs it freely : "Languid storms their pinions close." (/?. and H., 552.) *' Ye whirlwinds, who on poised wings hung mute ! " {Prom., i, 66.) "The noontide plumes of summer winds." {Prom., ii. i, 37.) It is characteristic of the breadth of Shelley's imagi- nation that it is as much at home in the depths of the earth as among the clouds and stars. His is not — like the Veda's — a purely aerial mythology. His restless intellect strives, in his own words {Prom., 4, 279) to : " Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart ; Infinite mine of adamant and gold, Valueless stones, and unimagined gems. And caverns on crj'stalline columns poised With vegetable silver overspread ; Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs . . . the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles ; anchors, beaks of ships ; Planks turned to marble , . . The wrecks beside of many a city vast. Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human . . . and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale. And serpents, bony chains." . . . The same ideas are expressed with more concen- tration in the Earth Spirit's speech in the TJie Unfinished Drama (Forman, ii. 103), which, although in form a close imitation of the well-known lines which open Milton's Covins — "Before the starry threshold of Jove's court my mansion is . . . above the smoke and stir X 2 3oS SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. of this dim spot, which men call earth " — is otherwise original : " Within the silent centre of the earth My mansion is ; where I have Hved insphered From the beginning, and around my sleep Have woven all the wondrous imagery Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world ; Infinite depths of unknown elements IMassed into one impenetrable mask ; Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron. And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven, I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds, And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns In the dark space of interstellar air." This ideal subterranean landscape — which forms a strange contrast to the ideal forest landscape in Alastor — may help us to realise that gloomy Northern imagination which gave birth to the dvergar, or dwarfs of Scandi- navian mythology — those dark, mis-shapen beings, malicious and revengeful, yet wise and helpful, skilled above all in working metals. Compare Letter to Maria Gisbornc, 58 : "... quicksilver ; that dew which the gnomes drink When at their subterranean toil they swink. Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who Reply to them in lava — cry halloo ! " Shelley was especially fascinated by those stupendous manifestations of the earth's inner life — volcano and earthquake, which latter he generally personifies : " Yon volcano's flaming fountains." {Pro?n., ii. 3, 3.) " Is this the scene Where their earthquake demon taught her young ruin ?" {Moni Blaftc, 71.) " The Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds. When the rocks split and close again behind." {Prom. I, 38.) " Springs of flame, which burst where'er swift Earthquake stamps." (Z. a?id C, 5, i.) Shelley's personifications of fire and of night have SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 309 already been noticed incidentally (pp. 296, 301). His personifications of winter {Sensitive Plant, 3, 94), of death — whom, as we have seen (p. 301), he makes the brother, sometimes of Sleep, sometimes of Night — and of the dififerent emotions and workings of the mind, resemble those of other poets. He gives wings {R. and H., ySj ; The Two Spirits, Forman, ii. 207) and " lightning feet" {Prom., i, 734) to desire. So also he calls dreams the " passion-winged ministers of thought " {Adonais, 9), Compare Prom., iii. 3. 145. " Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams," which was probably suggested by Milton's L' Allegro, 146: " And the waters murmuring . . . Entice the dewy-winged Sleep. And let some strange mysterious Dream Wave at its wings, in aery stream Of lively portraiture displayed, Softly on my eyelids laid." Of all abstractions the one oftenest personified by poets of all periods is Time. Even the Vedic poets show the beginnings of this personification. The ab- stract conception of time seems to have been realised most clearly by them in the unfailing recurrence of the dawn. They contrast the eternal youth and beauty of the Dawn — that fair maiden brilliant with gold and jewels — and the ruthless cruelty with which she " wears away the generations of men." The same idea of the cruelty of time is much dwelt on by Shakespere. In Sonnet xvi. he calls him " this bloody tyrant Time"; in Liicrece he calls him "mis- shapen Time," " injurious shifting Time," But in another place in the same poem he dwells on the more favourable side of Time's character : " Time's glory is ... to un- mask falsehood, and bring truth to light ... to cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops." Shelley's favourite comparison of time is to a sea or river : " Behind Terror and Time conflicting drove, and bore On their tempestuous flood the shrieking wretch from shore . . . 3IO SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. That Ocean's wrecks . . . the ghosts which to and fro Ghde o'er its dim and gloomy strand." (Z-. and C, 2, 6.) "Time's fleeting river." {Liberty, 6.) This comparison is worked out with great force in Time (Forman, ii. 232), where the " flood " is again per- sonified as a howling monster, which latter is thus an indirect personification of time itself. " Unfathomable Sea ! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears ! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow, Claspest the limits of mortality ! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore ; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm. Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable Sea ? " The question, Why should we have to go back to the Veda for parallels to Shelley's treatment of nature, is easily answered. Shelley, though a poet, looked at nature with the eyes of a scientific investigator. So did the primitive Aryans. Brought as they were face to face with nature, and surrounded by mysterious powers of good and evil, the first condition of existence for them was a know- ledge of the laws by which those powers are governed. When the first elements of this knowledge had been attained, civilisation advanced chiefly on political and social lines, and intellectual energy was absorbed more and more by literature. Then, after a long torpor, men awakened to the conviction that their future progress would depend mainly on their further advance in the knowledge of nature. Hence it is that extremes meet, and that the modern lover of nature — whether as poet or man of science — feels himself in some respects nearer to the primitive barbarism of the Veda than to the scholars of Greece and Rome, or even his own Chaucer and Shakespere. SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 311 Shelley's Light and Colour. We may now turn to a characteristic feature of Shelley's nature-poetry — his treatment of light and colour. Shelley's love of light has been well brought out by Mr. Symonds, who remarks: — "It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque ; and there is much in Projnetheus to justify this opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted. An ex.cess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated from the objects to which he looks : and in this radiation of many-coloured lights the outline itself is apt to become a little misty." It will be worth while to follow Shelley's treatment of light more into detail. We should expect him to be keenly sensitive to the effects of light in motion. The following are pictures of flashing and intermittent light : " Lifted ocean's dazzling spray . . , Spangles the wind with lamp-like waterdrops." {Prom., ii. 3, 30.) " As the bare green hill, When some soft cloud vanishes into rain, Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water To the unpavilioned sky." [Projii., 4, 182) "... where the pebble-paven shore Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea Trembles and sparkles as with ecstacy." {Epfp., 546.J " I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolve^ in star-showers, thrown . » a The lightning of the-noontide ocean Is flashing round me." {Dejection, 2.) "As in a brook, fretted with little waves, I>y the light airs of spring— each riplet makes l\ many-sided mirror for the sun." {OrpJieus, 59 ; Forman, li. 220.) The second passage may well be a reminiscence of yCschylus' "Innumerable laughter of ocean." Compare also the following passages from Shelley's L etters : 312 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. "The deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls." (Forman, iv. 3.) "The sea-water, furiously agitated by the wind, shone with sparkles like stars." (Forman, iv. 11.) Shelley loves also to depict the alternations of light and shade : " Like evening shades that o'er the mountains creep." *< A . , J ,• , {L. a?id C, 2, A9-) "And 'twas delight To see far off the sunbeams chase the shadows." (Z. atid C, 12, 36.) "... as shadows on a grassy hill Outrun the winds that chase them." {At/iafiase, 2, 13.) Compare Fragnients on Beauty, 2 : " The shadows of the clouds are spotting the bosoms of the hills." " The path that wound The vast and knotted trees around, Through which slow shades were wandering." {R. and H., \o2.) " Like a storm-extinguished day Travelled o'er by dying gleams." {Pro?/!., i. 678.) " The sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below." {Pf'om., I, 27.) " And wherever her airy footstep trod. Her trailing hair from the grassy sod Erased its light vestige with shadowy sweep. Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep." {Sensitive Pla?if, 2, 25.) A similar effect is described in Alastoi^, 310 : " The wind swept strongly from the shore, Blackening the waves." with which compare Athanase, 2, 50: "... o'er [his] visage . . a swift shadow ran. Like wind upon some forest-bosomed lake, / Glassy and dark." Shelley's use of the words shade and shadow is often peculiar. These words with him do not necessarily SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 313 imply darkness, but simply diminished light. This is clearly shown in the song of the Third Spirit in Prome- theus (I, 732): " When a Dream with plumes of flame To his pillow hovering came, . . . And the world a while below Wore the shade its lustre made " As a Dream or Spirit could not cast a shade, the word must here signify the dispersed, diminished lustre of the " plumes of flame." In A las tor, 123 : " When the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades," shades may, of course, have its usual meaning, but the passage would, perhaps, be more forcible if we suppose that here, too, shades means " shades of light" or " faint, uncertain light." When the moon rises, it is more natural to think of its light than of the shade cast by that light. Compare : " The dim and horned moon hung low, and poured A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fulness." {Alastor, 602.) "Through a dark chasm to the east, in the long perspective of a portal glittering with the unnumbered riches of the subterranean world, shone the broad moon, pouring in one yellow and unbroken stream her horizontal beams." {Assassins.) When 'Shelley calls the sea " heaven's ever-changing shadow," he includes the bright reflection of the sky as well as the shadows of dark clouds : shadow, in fact, is here equivalent to "reflection." Compare Prometheus 3, 2, 18, "the fields of Heaven-reflecting sea"; also Laon and Cythna, i, 20 and 12, 36, "the green and glancing shadows of the sea ", " shades beautiful and bright ", and Rosalind and Helen, 1 1 52 : "... beside his cheek. The snowy column from its shade Caught whiteness." 314 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. Shelley has a keen eye for atmospheric effects of light and colour : " I [the air] had clothed, since Earth uprose Its wastes in colours not their own." {Prom., r, 82.) *' And the bright air o'er every shape did weave Intenser hues." {L. and C, 3, 3.) "As from the all-surrounding air The earth takes hues obscure and strange, When storm and earthquake linger there'' (/?. a^!d //., 729.) " Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent night.'' {Dejectioji, i.) " Two . . wings . . dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere." {W.ofA.^z-].-) " Where the air is no prism . . . And the cavern crags wear not The radiance of heaven." {Prom , ii. 3, 74.) " The clouds . . . who have blended « The colours of the air since first extended, It cradled the young world." (Z. a/^d C, 2, 5 ) " Like joy which riseth up, As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds The desert of our life." {Prom., ii. i, 10.) Compare the following passages from the Letters : " From the boat the effect of the scenery was inexpressibly delightful. The colours of the water and the air breathe over all things here [Baiae] the radiance of their own beauty." (Forman, iv. 17.) "The water of this pool . . is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem as if trembling in the light of noonday." (Forman, iv. 8.) The latter passage also illustrates Shelley's treatment of light seen through water: *' This lady never slept, but lay in trance All nii;ht within the fountain . . . Through the green splendour of the water deep She saw the constellations reel and dance." (^K 0/ A.,2S.) SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 315 Shelley gives us some beautiful pictures of light seen through foliage : " The green light v, hich shifting overhead Some tangled bower of vines around me shed." (Z. a>id C, 2, I.) " High above was spread The emerald heaven of trees of unknown kind." {L. and C, 12, 18.) " Like sunlight through acacia woods at even." (Z,. andC.,T, n.) " Her cheeks and lips most fair, Changing their hue like lilies, newly blown, Beneath a bright acacia's shadowy hair. Waved bv the wind amid the sunny noon." (Z. and C, 8, 30.) " And the Naiad-like lily of the vale, Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale, That the light of its tremulous bells is seen Through their pavilions of tender green." {Sensitive Plant, 1,21.) "... the stream whose inconstant bosom Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom, With golden and green light, slanting through Their heaven of many a tangled hue." {Se?tsitive Plant, i, 41 ) " Under the green and golden atmosphere Which noon-tide kindles through the woven leaves." (Prom., ii. 2, 75 ) " Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen, Or fragments of the day's intense serene ; — Working mosaic on their Parian floors. ' {Epip., 502.) Similar to the above passages is Laon and Cyt/ina, 2, 29 : " Her white arms lifted through the shadowy stream Of her loose hair." He gives us a different picture of transmitted light in : " The hill Looks hoary through the white electric rain " {Letter to M. G., 123.) 3i6 SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. Refracted light : " The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray." {Alastor, 334.) " Or when the beams of the invisible moon, Or sun, from many a prism, within the cave Their gem-born shadows to the water gave." {L. and C, 7, 20.) But the most elaborate and vivid of Shelley's light- pictures are those which deal with reflection. In his Fragments on Beauty he asks : " Why is the reflection in that canal more beautiful than the objects it reflects ? The colours are more vivid, and yet blended with greater harmony ; the opening from within into the soft and tender colours of the distant wood, and the intersection of the mountain lines, surpass and misrepresent truth." The following are examples of reflected light : " He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom." {P7'0!n., i, 743.) " The keen sky-cleaving mountains From icy spires of sunlike radiance Fling the dawn," {Prom.,\\. 3, 28.) " Upon that rock a mighty column stood . . . . . . and when the shades of evening lie On Earth and Ocean, its curved summits cast The sunken daylight far through the aerial waste." {L. and C, 3, 12.) With the second passage compare Alastor, 352 : "... Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight." With the third Laon and CytJina, 12, 19: " Vast caves of marble radiance." Of reflected colour : "And she unveiled her bosom, and the green , And glancing shadows of the sea did play O'er its marmoreal depth." {L. and C, i, 20.) SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 317 " High above was spread The emerald heaven of trees of unknown kind, Whose moonlike blooms and bright fruit overhead A shadow, which was light, upon the waters shed," (Z. and C, 12, 18.) " And floating waterlilies, broad and bright. Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light." '{Recollection, 4 ) " The dark and azure well Sparkled beneath the shower of her bright tears, And ever}- little circlet where they fell Flung to the cavern-roof inconstant spheres And intertangled lines of light." {\V. of A., 25.) "... the sunny beams Which, from the bright vibrations of the pool, Were thrown upon the rafters and the roof Of boughs and leaves." {Unjimshed Drama, Yorm?Ln, ii. 109.) " As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels To gather for her festal crown of flowers The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek." {Prom., I, 467.) " A green and glowing light, like that which drops From folded lilies in which glowworms dwell." {W. of A., 39.) Pictures of objects reflected in water are very numerous in Shelley's poetr}', especially in Alastor ; there are many examples in ProinetJieus also, and, indeed, throughout his poetry generally. " The bright stars shining in the breathless sea." {L. and C, 3, 11.) " The glow of blazing roofs shone far o'er the white Ocean's flow." (Z. and C, 3, II.) " Her dark and deepening eyes, Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies O'er a dim well, move, though the star reposes." (Z. and C, 6, 33.) "As the sharp stars pierce winter's crj'Stal air And gaze upon themselves within the sea." {Prom, 4, 1 93 J ji a SHELLE Y'S NA TURE-POETR Y. "His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven." {A I as tor, 200.) " The bright arch of rainbow clouds And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake." {A last or, 213.) " I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined I saw two halcyons clinging downward . . . and in the deep there lay Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky." {Prom., iii. 4, 78.) " Banks, whose yellow flowers For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm." {Alastor, 406.) " And narcissi, the fairest among them all. Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess, Till they die of their own dear loveliness." {Sensitive Plant, I, iS.) " The rivulet . . through the plain in tranquil wanderings crejit, Reflecting every herb and drooping bud That overhung its quietness." {Alastor, 494.) " And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves." {Invitatio)i, 50.) " And saw in sleep old palaces and towers (2uivering within the wave's intenser day." ( West Wind, 3.) " The pools . . . each seemed as 'twere a little sky . , , In which the lovely forests grew As in the upper air." {Recollection, 53.) The most elaborate is that in Alastor, 457 : " Beyond, a well. Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave. Images all the woven boughs above, And each depending leaf, and every speck Of azure sky, darting between their chasms ; Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, Or gorgeous insect floating motionless, • Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon." SHELLE TS NA TURE-POE TR Y. 319 In Prometheus, ii. i, 17, two of Shelley's favourite elements — reflection in water and changing, intermittent light and colour — are combined in the most beautiful of all his dawn-pictures: "The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn Beyond the purple mountains : through a chasm Of wind-divided mist the darker lake Reflects it : now it wanes : it gleams again As the waves fade, and as the burning threads Of woven cloud unravel in pale air : 'Tis lost ! and through yon peaks of cloudlike snow The roseate sun-light quivers." Wordsworth's contrast of intermittence and pei- manence of reflection in his description of Peele Castle : "'Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there ; It trembled, but it never passed away," evidently impressed Shelley, for he repeats this image — so characteristic of Wordsvv^orth, so uncharacteristic of himself — in his own poetry : " Within the surface of the fleeting river The wrinkled image of the city lay. Immovably unquiet, and for ever It trembles, but it never fades away." {Evening, 3, Forman, ii. 260.) " Within the surface of Time's fleeting river Its [Athens'] wrinkled image lies, as then it lay Immovably unquiet, and for ever It trembles, but it cannotpass away I " {Liberty, 6, Forman, i. 454.) " And where within the surface of the river The shadows of the massy temples lie, And never are erased — but tremble ever" . . . {IV. of A., S9-) Shelley's love of brightness is shown in his identifica- tion of colour with light : " The light Of wave-refiected flowers." {Prom. iii. 2,31.) 320 SHELLE Y'S NA TURE-POE TR Y. " Budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms, Which star the winds with points of coloured light, As they rain through them." {Prom., iii. 3, 137.) An expansion oi Aiastor, 438 and 484: "... the parasites. Starred with ten thousand blossoms." " Soft mossy lawns . . . Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute, yet beautiful." Like most modern poets, Shelley has a strong sense of colour-contrast : " Orange and lemon groves . . . whose golden globes contrasted with the white walls and dark green leaves." {Letters, Forman, iv. 19.) " Bright golden globes Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven." {Prom., iii. 3, 139.) " Those globes of deep-red gold Which in the wood the strawberry-tree doth bear, Suspended in their emerald atmosphere." {Marenghi, 13, Forman, ii. 182.) " Those bright leaves, whose decay, Red, yellow, or ethereally pale, Rivals the pride of summer." {Alastor, 584.) " When red morn made paler the pale moon." {Alastor, 137.) " When the waves beneath the starlight flee O'er the yellow sands with silver feet." {R. and H., 782.) " And every shepherdess of Ocean's flocks. Who drives her white waves over the green sea." {W. of A., 10.) He has the old Celtic contrast of blood and snow : " Blood stains the snowy foam of the tumultuous deep." {L. afid C, I, II.) If we turn now to Shelley's predecessors, we find — as we should expect — colour-contrast fully developed in Milton : " Russet lawns and fallows gray." *' The flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose." SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY. 321 Another Puritan poet — Andrew Marvell — has antici- pated the first-quoted colour-contrast of Shelley in his Bermudas : "He hangs in shades the orange bright Like golden lamps in a green night." I have not any examples of colour-contrast in Chaucer or Shakespere to hand, but they could no doubt easily be found. IMilton seems to have the first examples of transmitted and interrupted light. The two classical passages are in LAllcgfo and // Pensej'oso : " Many a youth and many a maid Dancing in the chequered shade." " Storied window richly dight, Casting a dim religious light." But I cannot recall any examples of reflected light in Milton. I have noted one in Shakespere : " When Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with silver pearl the bladed grass." Even Wordsworth's pictures of reflected light are not remarkable either for elaborateness or beauty : "Let . . . the swan on still St. Mary's lake Float double, swan and shadow." " And lo ! these waters, steeled By breezeless air to smoothest polish, yield A vivid repetition of the stars." The poetry of " Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there ; It trembled, but it never passed away," lies rather in the thought than the picture itself. The following are examples of Wordsworth's treatment of transmitted light : " And while those lofty poplars gently wave Their tops, between them comes and goes a sky Bright as* the glimpses of eternity." " How delicate the leafy veil Through which yon house of God Gleams mid the peace of this deep dell !" 322 SHELLE Y'S NA TURE-POE TR Y. He has one beautiful picture of changing colour — " He spoke of plants that hourly change Their blossoms through a boundless range Of intermingling hues ; with budding, fading, faded flowers They stand, the wonder of the bowers, From morn to evening dews."' This description seems however to be partly a remi- niscence of some passage in a book of travels. The third line evidently suggested part of Shelley's descrip- tion in Prom., iii. 3. 137 (p. 320, above). Of all English poets the one whose treatment of light bears the closest resemblance to Shelley's is Coleridge, " The smoke from cottage chimneys, tinged with light, Rises in columns." {The Picture) " The sea .... the slip of smooth clear blue Betwixt two isles of purple shadow." {Limetree Bower.) " Like a summer shower. Whose dews fling sunshine from the noontide bower." (T/ie Visionaiy Hope) " WTiilst through my half-closed eyelids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main." {Eolia/i Harp) " The roaring dell o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the midday sun." {Limetree Bower) ". . . . In the wood .... Mid the chequer-work of light and shade." {Remorse, 2, I.) The last evidently a reminiscence of Milton's " chequered shade." Coleridge's affinity to Shelley is shown especially in his descriptions of transmitted light and colour : " And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes, Gleams through thy bright transparence !" {River Otter) " The unripe flax, When through its half-transparent stalks at eve The level sunshine glimmers with green'light." {Fears in Solitude) " Pale beneath the blaze [of the sun] Hung the transparent foliage." {Limetree Bower) SHELLE V 'S NA TURE-POE TR Y. 323 And in his elaborate pictures of reflection in water : " The woodbine bower, Whose rich flowers, swinging in the morning breeze, Over their dim, fast-moving shadows hung, Making a quiet image of disquiet In the smooth, scarcely-moving river-pool." {Keepsake.) *' And thou too, dearest Stream ! no pool of thine .... did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, The face, the form divine .... The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow .... Scatters them on the pool ! Then all the charm Is broken— all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shapes the other .... And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror ; and behold Each wild-flower on the marge inverted there, And there the half-uprooted tree— but where, O where, the virgin's snowy arm, that leaned On its bare branch ? " {The Picture.) These two passages may well have suggested Words- worth's favourite image of trembling but persistent reflection. Coleridge has another very elaborate picture of reflection in Remorse, ii., i : " There's a lake in the midst, And round its banks tall wood that branches over. And makes a kind of faery forest grow Down in the water. At the further end A puny cataract falls on the lake ; And there, a curious sight ! you see its shadow For ever curling, like a wreath of smoke, Up through the foliage of those faery trees." But Coleridge does not appear to have — any more than Wordsworth or Milton — any examples of reflected light or colour as distinguished from the reflection of definite objects : Shelley's picture of the " lake-reflected sun" illumining the "yellow bees in the ivy-bloom" seems to be entirely his own. It can hardly be a mere chance — this exceptional development of the sense of light in the two most intel- lectual poets of their age. Shelley himself associates Y 2 324 SHELLE Y'S NA TURE-P OE TR V. light with intellect — remarkably enough, with especial reference to Coleridge — in the Letter to Maria Gisbonie, 202 : " You will see Coleridge — he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre, and the pure, Intense irradiation of a mind, Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair — A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls." Compare Julian and Maddalo, 50 : *' The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light." This association has, indeed, stamped itself on the language of everyday life, which contrasts a " bright " mind with a "dull" one, and calls the age of ignorance " the Dark Ages." The similarity between the two poets in their treatment of light does not seem to be the result of imitation on the part of the younger poet : the agreement is in spirit, not in detail. The love of light was instinctive both in Coleridge and Shelley, and was fostered by their sur- roundings. Coleridge learnt to observe and love the effects of transmitted and reflected light in the shady lanes, and by the rivulets and pools of his native Devon, while Shelley learnt the same lessons in the woods of Marlow and in his boat on the Thames. We see, then, that the main characteristics of Shelley as a nature-poet : his breadth of view, his sense of structure, his love of the changing and fleeting, his myth-creating faculty, his treatment of light and colour — are all part of his intellectual temperament. T>XJE ON TFTJ li^ ST T» TF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 2Jurf58PT l3May601O hi) 21-100to-11,'49(B7146s16)476 i 1 305 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY *l>