The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

  Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,
  And Phoebus ’gins arise,
  His steeds to water at those springs
  On chalic’d flowers that lies;
  And winking Mary-buds begin
  To ope their golden eyes;
  With everything that pretty is,
  My lady sweet, arise;
  Arise!  Arise!

The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in Macbeth.

Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, and gives signs of coming disaster.

Macbeth himself says: 

                   Stars, hide your fires! 
  Let not light see my black and deep desires;
  The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
  Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

and Lady Macbeth: 

     ...  The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements....  Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry ’Hold! hold!’...

The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the tragedy.  Duncan says: 

  This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
  Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
  Unto our gentle senses.

and Banquo: 

                    This guest of summer,
  The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
  By his loved masonry, that the heaven’s breath
  Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,
  Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird
  Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
  Where they most breed and haunt I have observ’d
  The air is delicate.

Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.

In Act II.  Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature’s: 

               Now o’er the one half world
  Nature seems dead....  Thou sure and firm-set earth,
  Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
  Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.

Lady Macbeth says: 

  It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman
  Which gives the stern’st good-night.

Lenox describes this night: 

  The night has been unruly:  where we lay
  Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
  Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death
  And prophesying, with accents terrible,
  Of dire combustion and confus’d events,
  New hatch’d to the woeful time:  the obscure bird
  Clamour’d the live-long night:  some say, the earth
  Was feverish and did shake.

and later on, an old man says: 

Three score and ten I can remember well;
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.

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The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.