152 FRESH FIELDS 



by a certain phase of nature, — the nature of those 

 sombre, quiet, green, far-reaching mountain soli- 

 tudes. There is a shepherd quality about him; he 

 loves the flocks, the heights, the tarn, the tender 

 herbage, the sheltered dell, the fold, with a kind 

 of poetized shepherd instinct. Lambs and sheep 

 and their haunts, and those who tend them, recur 

 perpetually in his poems. How well his verse 

 harmonizes with those high, green, and gray soli- 

 tudes, where the silence is broken only by the bleat 

 of lambs or sheep, or just stirred by the voice 

 of distant waterfalls! Simple, elemental yet pro- 

 foundly tender and human, he had 



" The primal sympathy 

 Which, having been, must ever be." 



He brooded upon nature, but it was nature mirrored 



in his own heart. In his poem of " The Brothers " 



he says of his hero, who had gone to sea: — 



"He had been rear'd 

 Among the mountains, and he in his heart 

 Was half a shepherd on the stormy seas. 

 Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard 

 The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds 

 Of caves and trees; " 



and, leaning over the vessel's side and gazing into 

 the "broad green wave and sparkling foam," he 



" Saw mountains, — saw the forms of sheep that grazed 

 On verdant hills." 



This was what his own heart told him; every expe- 

 rience or sentiment called those beloved images to 

 his own mind. 



One afternoon, when the sun seemed likely to 



