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corridor, and through one room after another, all filled with “ Old 
Masters,” and yet you scarcely ever meet a landscape. This want 
is also observable in our National Gallery, if we leave out the 
works that are really modern. So too in Poetry the same neglect 
of Nature, outside humanity, is equally apparent, until we draw 
near our own times, when we are presented with a galaxy of names 
whose landscapes of the pen are as numerous and beautiful as are 
those of the modern pencil. 
This absence of landscapes in the works of the older poets 
and painters, I take it, is an indication that the love of scenery has 
been but recently developed. Ofcourse it may be that there is some 
charm in Nature now that has not ever been—some beauty in the 
woods, the fields, and mountains that was not long ago; but I 
think a careful study of all the evidence will show, that there is 
rather a fresh faculty in man—a newly acquired chord of exquisite 
fineness, which vibrates in unison with a note in Nature’s varied 
strain that aforetime passed unheeded. 
In no one perhaps has this faculty been more highly developed 
than in Wordsworth, for it seems, indeed, in studying his works you 
cannot avoid the conclusion, that his whole life was influenced by 
it. In his beautiful poem written ‘On Revisiting the Banks of 
the Wye,” we learn something of the power of this new develop- 
ment in the words :— 
““ How oft— 
In darkness and amid the many shapes 
Of joyless daylight ; when the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— 
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
O sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer through the woods. 
How often has my spirit turned to thee ! 
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, 
With many recognitions dim and faint, 
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 
The picture of the mind revives again : 
While here I stand not only with the sense 
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts 
That in this moment there is life and food 
For future years,” 
