430 COSMOS. 



treats chiefly of events, passions, and characters, that descrip- 

 tions become merely the reflections, as it were, of the disposi- 

 tion and tone of feeling of the principal personages. Shake- 

 speare who, in the hurry of his animated action, has hardly 

 ever time or opportunity for entering deliberately into the 

 descriptions of natural scenery, yet paints them by accidental 

 reference, and in allusion to the feelings of the principal 

 characters, in such a manner that we seem to see them, and 

 live in them. Thus, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, we 

 live in the wood; and in the closing scenes of the Merchant 

 of Venice, we see the moonshine which brightens the warm 

 summer's night, without there being actually any direct 

 description of either. " A true description of nature occurs, 

 however, in King Lear, where the seemingly mad Edgar 

 represents to his blind father, Gloucester, while on the plain, 

 that they are ascending Dover Cliff. The description of the 

 view, on looking into the depths below, actually excites a 

 feeling of giddiness."* 



If, in Shakespeare, the inward animation of the feelings, 

 and the grand simplicity of the language, gave such a won- 

 derful degree of life-like truth and individuality to the expres- 

 sion of nature; in Milton's exalted poem of Paradise Lost the 

 descriptions are, from the very nature of the subject, more 

 magnificent than graphic. The whole richness of the poet's 

 fancy and diction is lavished on the descriptions of the luxu- 

 riant beauty of Paradise, but, as in Thomson's charming didac- 

 tic poem of The Seasons, vegetation could only be sketched 

 in general and more indefinite outlines. According to the 

 judgment of critics deeply versed in Indian poetry, Kalidasa's 

 poem on a similar subject, the Ritusanhara, which was writ- 

 ten more than fifteen hundred years earlier, individualises, 

 with greater vividness, the powerful vegetation of tropical 

 regions, but it wants the charm which, in Thomson's work, 

 springs from the more varied division of the year in northern 

 latitudes, as the transition of the autumn rich in fruits to the 

 winter, and of the winter to the reanimating season of spring; 

 and from the images which may thus be drawn of the labours 

 or pleasurable pursuits of men in each part of the year. 



* I have taken the passages distinguished in the text by marks of 

 quotation, and relating to Calderon and Shakespeare, from unpublished 

 letters, addressed to myself by Ludwig Tieck. 



