394 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



bowed to the dominant spirit of the nineteenth century. 

 Keats, ' the Elizabethan born out of due time,' as he has I 

 been called, kept himself indeed unspotted from the contagion 

 of science. Yet his passion for nature, moving though it did 

 on lines traced by Spenser, has a far greater intensity, a far 

 more fiery self-abandonment to *the intoxication of earth, 

 than would have been possible in the sixteenth century. 

 Professor Conington used to formulate Keats' craving after 

 nature in a somewhat ribald epigram : ' Would thou wert a 

 lollipop, then I could suck thee.' The modern spirit took 

 this form of sensuous imaginative subjectivity in Keats. In 

 Byron it became a kind of lust, burning but disembodied, an 

 escapement of the defrauded and disillusioned soul into com- 

 munings with forces blindly felt to be in better and more 

 natural tune with him than men were. Shelley's metaphysical 

 mind was touched by nature to utterances of rapt philosophy, 

 which may some day form the sacred songs of universal 

 religion. ' Prometheus Unbound ' and the peroration of 

 ' Adonais ' enclose in liquid numbers that sense of spirituality 

 permeating the material world upon which our future hopes 

 are founded. Wordsworth, working apart from his contem- 

 poraries, expressed man's affinity to nature and man's depen- 

 dence on the cosmic order with greater reserve. Still, it is 

 difficult to go farther in nature-worship than Wordsworth did 

 in those sublimely pathetic lines written above Tintern Abbey ; 

 and nothing indicates the difference between the Victorian 

 and the Elizabethan touch on the world better than his blank 

 verse fragment describing a pedestrian journey through the 

 Simplon Pass. 



In the course of the nineteenth century it might seem as 

 though this passion for nature the passion of Keats, Byron, 

 Shelley, Wordsworth had declined. To assume this would, 

 however, be a great mistake. What has steadily declined is 

 the Elizabethan strain, the way of looking upon nature from 

 outside. The modern strain, the way of looking upon nature 

 as congenial to man, has strengthened, but with fear and 

 rending of the heart, and doubt. The time is not yet ripe 

 for poetry to resume the results of science with imaginative 



