258 ROUND THE YEAR 



" While now we sang old songs that peal'd 



From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease, 

 The white kine glimmer'd and the trees 

 Laid their dark arms about the field." 



Wordsworth, Burns and Shakespeare share this 

 loving appreciation of Nature. I do not find it in 

 Shelley, though the general voice gives it to him. 

 Gray comes near to it once or twice, as here : 



" The red-breast loves to build and warble there, 

 And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 



Thomson has his successes, mostly happy words, 

 but they are the gems of a rhetoric whose lustre is not 

 always real. Pope's rhapsody about the moonlight 

 (for Homer has little share in it) won high praise from 

 more than one generation. To us it is nothing but 

 magnificent declamation ; no observant person could 

 describe moonlight so. 



The examples from Tennyson, which of course 

 illustrate only one side of his poetic endowment, charm 

 us partly by their terse characterisation of what we all 

 know, but never attended to before, but still more by 

 their feeling for the human aspect of Nature. It is 

 not rocks, clouds, flowers and birds which chiefly 

 engage the poet's mind, but the relation of these to 

 the thoughts and hopes of Man ; they are intertwined 

 with the history of a man's life. The reality of the 

 observation, the reality of the feeling, save Tennyson 

 from the common faults of those who show knowledge 

 in their poetry ; he is never pedantic, nor whimsical, 

 nor cold. 



