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.
the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!  Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy!  O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and sympathy in them; for instance: 

  The fountains mingle with the river,
  And the river with the ocean;
  The winds of heaven mix for ever
  With a sweet emotion.... 
  See the mountains kiss high heaven,
  And the waves clasp one another... 
  And the sunlight clasps the earth,
  And the moonbeams kiss the sea.

and: 

  I love all thou lovest,
  Spirit of Delight;
  The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,
  And the starry night,
  Autumn evening and the morn
  When the golden mists are born. 
  I love snow and all the forms
  Of the radiant frost;
  I love waves and winds and storms—­
  Everything almost
  Which is Nature’s, and may be
  Untainted by man’s misery.

To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but both of England’s greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain perfect harmony of thought and feeling.  There always remained a bitter ingredient in their poetry.

Let us now turn to France.

LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO

Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre portrayed it poetically, not only in Paul and Virginia, but in Chaumiere Indienne and Etudes de la Nature.  The science which these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination:  he lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the mind and the phenomena of the outer world.  Chateaubriand, on the contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent.  It is true that his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling.  He had Rousseau’s melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those ’oppressive masses,’ mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and the Mississippi—­above all, about the sea.  His Rene, that life-like figure, half-passionate, half-blase, measuring everything by himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed a lover’s devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[15] ’It was not God whom I contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His works:  I saw an unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the beauties of the sky, seemed to me disclosed by her breath.  I would have bartered eternity for one of her caresses.  I pictured her to myself as throbbing behind this veil of the universe which hid her from my eyes.  Oh! why was it not in my power to rend the veil and press the idealized woman to my heart, to spend myself on her bosom with the love which is the source of my inspiration, my despair, and my life?’

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