On the 26th April, 1335, Mt. Ventoux, near Avignon, was the scene of a remarkable occurrence. Petrarch was the hero, and on the evening of that day, while the impression was yet strong upon him, he wrote an account of it to a friend. The incident was nothing less than climbing a mountain for Æsthetic gratification. That he cared to do it showed that Petrarch was on the outskirts of mediÆvalism.

The narrative is so interesting that I may translate a part of it; for the great humanist's letters are inaccessible to general readers. He says that he had thought of climbing the mountain for many years, since he had known the country from early boyhood, and the great mass of rocky cliff, entirely rugged and almost inaccessible, was constantly and everywhere visible. He took with him his brother and two servants. As they were starting on the ascent, they fell in with an aged shepherd, who tried to dissuade them. Fifty years before he had climbed to the summit, moved by a boyish impulse—and he supposed himself the only one who had ever done it; his recollections were full of awe and terror. But the poet pressed on, beguiling the weariness, which at times amounted almost to exhaustion, by moralizing on the labor as a type of spiritual attainments. At the summit of the highest peak, "moved deeply at first by that vast spectacle, and affected by the unusual lightness of the air, I stood as if overwhelmed. I looked, and under my feet I saw the clouds." His thoughts turned to the classical myths, and the history of his beloved Italy. He recalled that ten years before, on that same day, he had left Bologna and his studies. How many changes in his ways. His wrong loves—he loved them no longer, or rather he no longer liked to love them. He thought of his future.

"Thus rejoicing in what I had gained, regretful of my weakness, and pitying the common instability of human affections, I seemed to forget where I was and why I had come. At last I turned to the occasion of my expedition. The sinking sun and lengthening shadows admonished me that the hour of departure was at hand, and, as if started from sleep, I turned around and looked to the west. The Pyrenees—the eye could not reach so far, but I saw the mountains of Lyonnais distinctly, and the sea by Marseilles; the Rhone, too, was there before me. Observing these closely, now thinking on the things of earth, and again, as if I had done with the body, lifting my mind on high, it occurred to me to take out the copy of St. Augustine's Confessions that I always kept with me; a little volume, but of unlimited value and charm. And I call God to witness that the first words on which I cast mine eyes were these: 'Men go to wonder at the heights of mountains, the ocean floods, rivers' long courses, ocean's immensity, the revolutions of the stars,—and of themselves they have no care!' My brother asked me what was the matter. I bade him not disturb me. I closed the book, angry with myself for not ceasing to admire things of earth, instead of remembering that the human soul is beyond comparison the subject for admiration. Once and again, as I descended, I gazed back, and the lofty summit of the mountain seemed to me scarcely a cubit high, compared with the sublime dignity of man."[1]

In these sentences we find the new life and the old in the same mind. Such an action would have been impossible for a genuine son of the middle ages, but could Petrarch stand on a mountain top to-day, such an outcome of it would be equally impossible. His feeling for nature was intense even to a sense of the charm of ruggedness in hills, as Burckhardt, who refers to this letter in his work on The Italian Renaissance, shows by ample quotations; but the intense lover of nature in the nineteenth century, though his ethical sense be as deep as Wordsworth's, finds a different influence in such a scene. Indeed, read in Wordsworth himself, the modern contrast:

How far apart is the piety of the two poets, how different their absorption. This identification of the human mood with Nature, and the spiritual elation that arises from the union, is thoroughly characteristic of the present century. Wordsworth's peculiar beauty, as Hartley Coleridge told Caroline Fox, "consisted in viewing things as amongst them, mixing himself up in everything that he mentions, so that you admire the man in the thing, the involved man." And Hartley's inspired father uttered a great criticism on the modern feeling for nature, when in the Ode on Dejection he cried,

No literary contemporaries were ever more apart than Wordsworth and Byron, yet Childe Harold has the same note:

We discover the same sentiment, more delicately held, in Keats, as in some of his sayings about flowers, and Shelley, speaking of the longing for a response to one's own nature, says:

"The discovery of its antitype, this is the invisible and unattainable point to which love tends.... Hence in solitude, or in that state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motions of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a secret correspondence with our heart, that awakens the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic rapture, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone."

Yet this spirit, with which our later poetry is almost everywhere touched, "this mysterious analogy between human emotions and the phenomena of the world without us," as von Humboldt expresses it, in its present comprehensiveness is new to literature. To feel for mountains, forests, or the ocean, with mingled awe, love, and ecstasy, seems so natural to us, that we can hardly realize that Gray was striking a novel and significant chord when he wrote at the Grande Chartreuse, "One of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes.... Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry."

In Petrarch's letter we observe the deficiency in absorbing enthusiasm for the grander forms of nature, as well as his sense of the isolation of such sentiment from true spiritual life. Yet this letter is the most significant indication which we possess from the middle ages of a capacity for enjoying the sublimity of heights. In PrÆterita, Ruskin, while describing his eagerness at the first sight of the Alps, as a boy, has written two or three sentences that we may employ to illustrate the contrast between Petrarch and his predecessors:

"Till Rousseau's time there had been no 'sentimental' love of nature ... St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds."

Others, beside the Bernards, men from whose culture and intelligence we should expect fine appreciation, felt nothing august or inspiring in the material world. So far as we have any record, the fourteenth-century laureate was the first of the moderns to climb a mountain for the Æsthetic pleasure of the view. Burckhardt's suggestion that this honor belongs to Dante, on the strength of a passage in the fourth canto of the Purgatory, is surely not tenable; for the top of Bismantova possessed a citadel in Dante's time to which business may easily have called him. All through the middle ages, the lofty elevations between central Europe and Italy were constantly being crossed. The most cultivated men were going back and forth as couriers on business of the Church, and the political relations, especially between Italy and Germany, kept up a continual stream of travel. Yet one recalls no lines in any mediÆval poem that describe or express sensations of the least interest concerning the sights that have bowed the strongest souls of our era, that have been felt by thousands, and put into words by so many poets.

There is, indeed, in the beginning of a passage from a famous scholar, John of Salisbury, an apparent exception to this strange indifference; but a few clauses correct the hasty judgment. Writing from Lombardy, he explained why he could not send a letter from the Great St. Bernard: "I have been on the mount of Jove: on the one hand looking up to the heaven of the mountains; on the other, shuddering at the hell of the valleys; feeling myself so much nearer to heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard." Yet this was due to no rapture of soul, for—"Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that they come not into this place of torment." He goes on to specify the perils of ice, precipice, and cold, and nothing disturbs him so much as that his ink was frozen. But there is not a suggestion of anything worth looking at. Even CÆsar, as von Humboldt reminds us, composed a rhetorical treatise while crossing the Alps. But the poet of Vaucluse did climb a mountain for the love of the view, and the very fact that his Æsthetic attention was distracted by ethical introspection is an indication of that serious sensibility which was destined to become such an essential element in our feeling for nature; what for every Wordsworthian is summed up in the second mood of Tintern Abbey.

This incapacity for appreciating mountainous sublimity involved a blindness to the rugged and picturesque on smaller scales. In minor chords, and in combinations of tone superficially discordant, we have learned to recognize some of nature's richest harmonies; this is one of our marks of development. Closely linked, too, with this first of modern passions for nature, indeed unified with it by the qualities of strength and massiveness, is our feeling for the ocean and great woods.

Even deeper than the idea of companionship here is the mystical sense of absorption into that physical world which seems the very dwelling-place of the infinite soul, which finds one of its most remarkable manifestations in an intense and almost defiant sensation of human transitoriness and unimportance, and which is frequently blended with very exultation in the reflection that presently we ourselves shall be unified forever with the unconscious life that stretches out before us:

There is a strange fascination to the modern mind, in presence of the majesties of nature, in this thought of humanity's return to the earth-mother. Innumerable generations have come home to her, as many or more are to be born that they may follow them, and she remains. Perhaps we are never so serenely conscious of self, as in these rare moments when we bear without a pang the thought of losing personal identity. There is something more here than the certainty of at least materialistic immortality, and the impression of infinite repose and beauty.

The projection of our immediate sensation into the long future silence suffuses nature with pantheistic life, until the eager and buoyant thrills of spiritual realization render one grateful to have been permitted to gain such a sensation at what seems the trivial cost of feeling oneself the mere creature of a day. Such a mood as this certainly comes but seldom, but probably every one who has ever experienced any imaginative sensibility to a grand landscape will recall a heightened sensation that is beyond description.[2]

But still stranger than the failure to catch the finer suggestions in the more strenuous forms of nature, is the way in which such sights are ignored. In southern Europe, mountains, storms, rocks, the ocean, are scarcely ever described, even as objects of awe or terror. When in the course of a story they have to be mentioned, the treatment is brief and matter of fact. Heinrich von Veldeke in his famous epic, makes nothing of his necessary introduction of a storm at sea, nor does Gottfried, or indeed any one of this whole period.

Gudrun, that epic of the people which deserves to stand near the more famous Niebelungen Lied, treats constantly of the ocean, yet never with any feeling except dread of shipwreck. This poem, however, shows a more northern tone in one or two descriptions of winter, that are at least elaborated. In the scene, for instance, when Herwig and Ortwin arrive at the shore where Hildeburg and Gudrun, almost naked, are washing the clothes for their cruel mistress, we find some realistic touches, such as their trembling before the March wind, in which their hair was streaming as they toiled on the beach, while before them the sea was full of cakes of ice that had broken up under the early spring. In another connection, too, the poet compares something to a thick snowstorm, driven by mountain winds. The sense of fitness in a sympathetic natural environment for the human action, that has been so generally regarded in literature, as by Shakespeare, is indeed occasionally found in mediÆval poetry; so in an interesting French romance that relates the trials of a heroine who barely escapes with her life, after the loss of everything dear: "The lady is in the wood and bitterly she wails. She hears the wolves howl, and the screech-owls cry; it lightens terribly, and the thunder is heavy, rain, hail, and wind—'tis wild for a lady all alone."

Exceptions occur now and then. Dante, for example, was impressed by the mountains; no readers of the Purgatory need to be reminded of his experience in climbing them. The setting for a mood of unrealized love in one of his lyrics is in winter, among the whitened hills: "He wooed the lady in a lovely grassy meadow, surrounded by lofty hills." But the arbitrary verbal repetitions of the sestina modify the original face of the image of the mountains towering about the lover's plain, and the pensive beauty of the whole poem may be connected with an allegory. But I believe that even in Dante we never catch the sense of exultation in the earth's power and majesty.

Our modern feeling for forests is not only at times sombre and oppressive; we also derive a sense of sublime composure from them. This latter sentiment was hardly shared by the mediÆvals. Dante was only following earlier poets when he located the opening of Hell by a gloomy wood, and his repeated metaphor of life as a forest, "confusing," "gloomy," and "dark," accords with the feeling of his age. He would not have appreciated Chateaubriand. He has left us, however, a rare and interesting reference to the soughing in the pines on the Adriatic, which shows how well his ear could interpret its solemn beauty. The mystical apple-tree, moreover, near the close of the Purgatory, whose blossoms are so exquisitely defined, indirectly reminds us how exceptional is a mention of fruit trees in flower. Yet the ProvenÇal, French, and German lyrics constantly begin with the joyousness of spring, and the happy contrast from the season that destroys flowers and foliage. Nothing is more conventional than these nature preludes. Over and over, till we close our books impatiently, we hear reiterations of the charm of spring and summer. There is a slender kind of grace and sincerity that would lend interest to many of these, if they had come down by themselves; but they lie together in books in wearisome uniformity. A dandelion in April is much prettier than the dandelions in June. These preludes are usually in keeping with the love-phrases that follow, cold and imitative. For poets thought and felt in exterior generalities, rather than in detachment and inner consciousness. Their typical landscape may be seen in a passage from Gottfried von Strassburg,—one of Germany's most brilliant poets—where Tristan and Isolde have fled to the forest grotto, in fear of King Mark. The grotto is fitted up luxuriously, in keeping with the temper of the entire poem, but since it is in the wilderness, far away from roads or paths, in a description of its surroundings we might certainly look for a sense of the picturesque. But so far from caring for the wild and rugged, Gottfried does not even like a quiet woodland simplicity.

"Above the entrance stood three broad lindens, no more; but below, stretching down the slope, were innumerable trees that hid the retreat. On one side was a level stretch where a fountain flowed, a fresh, cool stream, clearer than the sun. Above it, too, stood three beautiful shady lindens that shielded the spring from rain and the sun. Bright blossoms and green grass struggled with each other sweetly on the field. One caught also the delightful songs of birds which sang more delightfully there than anywhere else. Eye and ear each had its pleasure, there was shade and sun, air and breezes soft and pleasing."

He goes on to describe the lovers, in a passage from which I translate the opening:

These lines are characteristic of Gottfried, even to the lingering verbal repetition, and the picture certainly is pretty, as is the whole account of the lovers' life that follows. Nothing in early German literature comes closer to refined modern sensuousness than Gottfried's best passages; there is a dreamy passion in them, and sometimes they flash. His rich voluptuous strain has more of the poet than the free-liver, and his general tone is curiously modern. It would be a showy phrase to call his Tristan the Don Juan of the middle ages, for the poems are very dissimilar, yet it is safe to say that we think of Byron as we read him. Contrast these representative poets of the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries in this matter of their feeling for nature. For once among German settings we have a wild scene. But we observe how studiously it is modified into the conventional meadow, with trees in uniform little groups, a grassy field is sprinkled with flowers, there is a spring, and the little stream that escapes from it instead of tumbling down over a rocky bed into a glen, flows across the field. Gottfried mentions mountains and rocks that lie round about, only to point out that they are types of the difficulties and perils to be undergone before reaching love's shrine. The almost inaccessible retreat was necessary as a shelter for the fugitives from Mark's court; the poet has done his best to obliterate the reality. If we turn to Byron, and look for instance at that incomparable passage in which he relates the early love of Juan and Haidee, we observe where he voluntarily places his lovers:

And, to pass over the description of sky, sea, moon, and starlight, that follows, as elements in the nature-setting, notice the scene where Juan is sleeping:

It would be easy to parallel these two situations; the older by no means ends with the middle ages, for Eden's "blissful bower" is no exception in modern poetry before the romantic age: while in our own century counterparts to this conception of untrained and strenuous natural surroundings for even the happiest of emotions will occur to every one.[3] The idle triteness in those inevitable scenes of spring, was manifest to some of the poets themselves. So the Comte de Champagne declares foliage and flowers of no service to poets, except for rhyming and to amuse commonplace people. The great Wolfram himself derides the conventionality of all romance narratives falling in spring and early summer:

And Uhland cites from the lives of the troubadours the contemporaneous criticism upon a minor poet of the twelfth century, who wrote in the old style about leaves, and flowers, and the song of birds,—nothing of any account. We may recollect that such criticisms go far back of the middle ages: Horace glances at his contemporaries' conventional descriptions of a stream hastening through pleasant fields.

In the widely popular romances of Enid we find illustrations of Welsh, French, and German treatment in the hands of leading authors, and there is one point in the narrative where we may compare their feeling for the natural environment. Readers of Tennyson will recall the passage in the wandering, where, after one of Geraint's struggles with bandits, he comes upon a lad carrying provisions. Chrestien's treatment of the episode is clear and straightforward; the youth and two comrades are taking cheese, cakes, and wine to the count's meadows for the haymakers. The young man notices the travellers' worn appearance, and invites them to sit down "in this fair meadow, under these ironwood trees," to rest and eat.

Hartmann von Aue (whose paraphrase of the French poem is, by the way, far from the merit of his Iwein) narrates the incident in the same manner, omitting the poetically specific touches of the haymaking, and the shady spot in the field; but characteristically inserting some courteous concern on the part of the young man, for the comfort of Enid. But if we turn to the Mabinogion we come upon something very different:

"And early in the day they left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand, and mowers mowing the meadows; and there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a lofty steep, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that there was something in the satchel, but they knew not what it was. And he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."

How charming it is, even to the lovely touch of color. We know here that the unremembered writer saw nature and cared for it as we do. Indeed, this mediÆval Welshman satisfies us quite as well as does even Tennyson's transcript:

There we have a simplicity treated with Tennysonian artifice, which "victual" does not succeed in correcting; beautiful in its way, though its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern spirit in the appreciation of the "brown wild" as well as the meadow, and out of the more general and evasive "steep" is developed the picturesque "rocky pathway."

Except for the interest in establishing these forms of nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early poems, where his descriptions are almost wholly derivative. His feeling for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with flowers; the earth's joyous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of May; his constant delight in the "smale foules," and the like, are purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects—most interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive rendering, like the description of twilight in Troylus and Creyseyde, when

or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sudden troubling of one's mood:

Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire castel faste by the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In the Knight's Tale, the wild picturesque is employed again to connote the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the passage, had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the God of War:

Nothing even in Childe Roland sketches desolating natural effects with more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of the author of Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght. But the poem marks on the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness, united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual, though much of course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be difficult to point out passages in the whole range of mediÆval literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of the northern winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird mission.

That is what we find in the North, and such English feeling for the sublime is nothing new; it goes far back beyond these lines into the generations that seem misty as the air which their poets are wont to describe. Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume on Anglo-Saxon poetry makes it unnecessary to enter into the subject of old England's eye and ear for nature. Its accounts of the sympathy for the bold and fierce bear out what one might guess without knowledge—that the stern northern climate and familiarity with ocean life found large poetical expression. Luxury, southern artifice of sentiment and literary manner, had not invaded the rugged men of the North; they delight in describing elemental conflicts, and sometimes with studied elaboration. But if the pictures of the German and French poets are uniform in their mildness, those of these Anglo-Saxons are marked by their stormy aspect. We exchange spring for winter.

The same contrast holds true when we take up the Scandinavian poets; they show much feeling and power, but little susceptibility to the beauty of gentleness and grace. Mr. Brooke has remarked upon a similarity between the Tempest of Cynewulf and Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. A closer parallel may be observed in the Lines Among the Euganean Hills and the so-called Helgi poet; where we find a curiously identical image of rooks and hawks flying into the early morning with wings sparkling from the mists through which they have passed. The Norse poems are fond of screaming eagles, and ravens on the high branches.

That weird northern imagination too has vivid pictures, as the shields of the night-warriors shining in the waning moon. Nature also occasionally speaks to their personal moods, both by harmony and contrast. A poet's boat is swept fiercely by the tempest, as he dies with thoughts of his "linen-clad lady" in his heart. Another watches the sea dashing against the steep cliff, and thinks of his far-away love, in the control of his rival. Like the early English, they feel exultation in sea and storm. They know them intimately and their descriptions are spirited and faithful. They love them, but they love fiercely, terribly, as they do their women. Yet even as in their human passions, there are tranquillities. "They rode their steeds through dewy dales and dusky glens: the air, a sea of mist, shook as they passed by." We linger behind the storming horsemen for a moment, to look back as the silence steals in again through those dusky glens.

But to return to what is our real subject, the sentiment for nature in what we may term the polite literatures of mediÆvalism.

The reason for their feeling about winter is summed up in one of the Latin student songs, "the cold icy harshness of winter, its fierceness, and dull, miserable inactivity." It kept them within, when their interests and concerns were so mainly out-of-door. The poets are for ever singing in praise of spring, not so much because they loved it for itself, as because it brought them a life that was gay and easy. They seldom introduce touches of appreciation in their descriptions of the wintry season. Snow may have appeared lovely to them, but we observe Dante as doing something singular when he compares the talking of ladies, which was mingled with sighs and tears, to raindrops interspersed with beautiful snowflakes (cp. Inf., 14, 30; 24, 5), and one of the most memorable lines in his friend Guido Cavalcanti's poems is the one which mentions the dreamy sinking down of snow, falling when the air is windless. The old-time gentlemen apparently hugged the fire and drank of "their bugle-horn the wyn," and ate "brawn of the tusked swyn," when winter came, instead of watching the snow, through their little windows.

There are many phases of nature which it seems to us impossible not to notice and enjoy, of which we seldom find a trace. We should expect them in the large body of lyrical verse, and still more in the copious romance literature, which corresponds to the modern novel, both in incident and in the invitation to bits of passing local color. Clouds, for instance, aside from their glory of line and mass, and the grace and loveliness of their lighter forms, are curious and oddly suggestive, as Antony reminds Eros, and they are constantly before the eye; yet let any reader of mediÆval poetry recall how imperceptible a part they play in it, even as plain facts of description. A line in one of the Latin songs expresses the feeling: their thought of clouds is, how delightful not to see them. Moonlight, too, is seldom dwelt on as poetical; the most romantic touch that comes to my mind in connection with it, is in Chrestien de Troyes, where it shines over the reconciliation of estranged lovers. Just as we find little notice of sunrise, sunset, clouds, and moon, we find little feeling for the stars. They are mentioned occasionally in a facile way, though scarcely ever with manifest sentiment. There are two or three passages, however, in Aucassin et Nicolette, that show the daintiest sort of sentiment for moonlight and stars. Here, for instance, where the lovers are confined for the sake of thwarting their love:

"'Twas in summer time, in the month of May, when the days are warm, long, and clear and the nights calm and cloudless. Nicolette was lying one night in her bed, and she saw the moon clearly shining through a window, and she heard the nightingale singing in the garden and she thought of Aucassin her lover, whom she loved so much."

So making a rope of the bedclothes she lets herself down into the garden.

"Then she caught her gown by one hand in front and by the other behind, and tucked it up on account of the dew which she saw was heavy on the grass, and she went down through the garden.... And the daisy-blossoms that she broke with the toes of her feet, that lay over on the small of her foot, were even black, by her feet and legs, so very white was the dear little girl. Along the streets she passed in the shadow, for the moon shone very clear, and she went on till she came to the tower where her lover was."

And again when the lover is in pursuit of her, after she had built herself a lodge in what she thought a safe retreat; he does not know where she is, and his thoughts are so absorbed that he falls and puts out his shoulder, and then creeps into her vacant shelter:

"And he looked through a break in the lodge and saw the stars in the sky, and he saw one brighter than the rest, and he began to say:

Yet even here there is nothing of the deeper sensibility to midnight sky, common alike to ancient and modern seriousness. Yet we find notes also of this. It is hard, for example, to think of giving up the genuineness of Dante's letter refusing to return to Florence, if only for the rare touch of everywhere seeing the sun and the stars (nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam?), that bears out such evidences as the last word of each of the divine canticles and other fine proofs that he felt the high wonder and peace of the stars at night. Who can doubt that he did—that every deep nature always has? Yet the poetical evidence for it is curiously scanty throughout these centuries. It is a surprise to come upon such an exclamation as this of Freidank's: "The constellations sweep through heaven as if they were alive,—sun, moon, the bright stars,—there is nothing so wonderful!"

Indeed, I can recall no writer to whom the material world seems to suggest such inner sensations as he who called himself Freidank, the German free-thinker. He was not much of a poet, so far as his verses go, but his soul knew life as mystery. He also made one of the band of reformers three centuries before Luther. He saw the corruption of the Church, yet he revered the sacred institution; in spite of his faith, he was a Christian rationalist. Some of his sentences almost startle us, as words before their season: "If the Pope can forgive sins by indulgence, without repentance, people ought to stone him if he allows any one to go to hell." "God is constantly shaping new souls, which he gives to men—to be lost. How does the soul deserve God's wrath before it is born?" He is haunted by the secret of life: "How is the soul made? No one tells me that. If all souls could be in a hand, none could see or grasp their glory." "Earth and heaven are full of the Godhead. Hell would be empty, were God not there." "Whatever the sun touches, the sunlight keeps pure. However the priest may be, the mass is still pure. The mass and the sunshine will always be pure." "I never cease wondering how the soul is made. Whence it came, and whither it fares—the path is hidden. Nay, I know not who I am myself.[4] Lord God, grant me that I may know thee, and also myself." So when Freidank hears the roar of the wind, its invisible might reminds his skepticism that the soul may well be great, though none can see it: while he watches the wide mist which no hand can seize upon, a symbolism of the soul comes to him again. He is oppressed by the restless energy of being: "Our hearts beat unceasingly, our breaths are seldom still:—and then, our thoughts and dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity of nature:

"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision could come only from a refined and pensive spirit—such as his who sums up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when the heart weeps."

One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most mediÆval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details. The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.

There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive, whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his local associations:

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,—as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river," or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor. There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's

or Wordsworth's ash,

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediÆval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old."

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We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather, not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to develop sturdier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities, such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from association more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an anticipation of the seriousness of modern English literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the Mabinogion, we find a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we find such nature sensation as in the poetry of Sir Gawayn. But the literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner. The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule devote themselves to belles-lettres. The Church drew them into her sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed. Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine Æsthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi explains his usefulness as a painter:

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the methods of mediÆval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other "How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle, verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects. But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were, at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediÆval poets than for Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge. But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common cause—that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which is a main fact in man's expansion.

A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and ethical sensitiveness.

Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward contemplation—we are famous for them—our modern zeal for humanity down to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more poetical too, than that of mediÆvalism, has touched men with its pensive fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an unconquerable partner of its own eternity.

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