NATURE NOTES 
162 
The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms were then to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love 
That had no need of a remoter charm 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye, 
may be taken as a typical expression of this spirit. But such 
a treatment is quite absent from Shakespeare. Not that he 
does not know and love Nature well, he does both, but he never 
pauses to reflect on his feeling for her. He loves her as a 
healthy child loves its friends and its sports, enjoys her as such 
a child does its food, unconsciously, and as a matter of course. 
In his position as regards Nature he stands midway between 
the ancients and ourselves. Nature is not so near him, does not 
dominate his life, as she did and does with those to whom stones 
and trees and animals are the dwelling places or incarnations of 
spirits able to work him weal or woe. But he is nearer to her, 
and hence less critical of her and of her effect on him than we 
are, who, with all our enriched love of her, are doomed in a 
sense to be ever aloof from her, “ exiled ” from her in a greater 
or less degree “ in our cold homes of art and thought.” This 
aesthetical appreciation of Nature has developed rapidly in 
modern times, and that Shakespeare is without it is more a 
characteristic of his age than of himself. The other respect, 
however, in which his treatment of her differs from that of most 
modern poets bears in a great degree the stamp of his peculiar 
genius. 
Modern poets, as we have said, since they cannot treat Nature 
theocratically, treat her philosophically and subjectively. They 
interpret her, they read into her and see in her the reflection of 
their own thoughts and theories, and they do this according to the 
bent of their own mind, religiously, morally, or mystically. Take 
first the purely religious. We find this abundantly expressed in 
Keble, in George Herbert, in Cowper, and again, very typically 
and beautifully in Smart’s “ Song of David,” with its concluding 
lines : — 
All Nature without voice or sound 
Replied, “ O Lord Thou art.” 
In reading Tennyson we feel ourselves in a religio-philo- 
sophical atmosphere. He clearly sees the difficulties, the con- 
tradictions presented by Nature ; but in spite of all he believes 
that cosmos will come out of chaos, harmony from discord, that 
sooner or late “there must be answer to our doubt.” The chief 
note in Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of her is like his defini- 
tion of religion, “morality tinged with emotion.” Of this we 
have a very good example in his poem “ Independence.” Shelley 
has equal sentiment but less morality and some mysticism. 
Wordsworth, who was the first modern poet to make us “ feel ” 
Nature and to express in language unsurpassed the purest and 
