mands the explanation of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: "Lucretius is not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery, to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on condition that I may investigate and understand thee." In Lucretius man and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction, satisfaction as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.

Lucretius had, as we know, a philosophic faith about Nature, which satisfied his understanding, if it did not satisfy what was deeper in him than understanding that high imagination and poetic instinct which at times craved a more spiritual interpretation. Virgil, on the other hand, had no consistent theory regarding that Nature which he apprehended so feelingly. In general he acquiesced in the orthodox mythology which he had received from the tradition of the poets. And yet, while he accepted it for poetic, or even patriotic reasons, he must, when he thought of it, have felt strange misgivings. For the mythologic faith had entirely ceased to be real to himself or to his

educated countrymen. That he longed at times to penetrate the secret of Nature, and to know the causes of things, he himself assures us. But there is no evidence in his poetry that he ever rose to as clear a conception of one all-ruling Divine Power as even Cicero had probably reached. There are, however, two well-known passages, one in the fourth Georgic, the other in the sixth Eneid, in which Virgil expresses a mystic and pantheistic theory as to an all-pervading life of the world, which, if it cannot be called his philosophic belief, seems to have been to him at least more than a mere poetic fancy. Lucretius, impelled by the craving of his imagination for life, not death, had in the opening of his poem and elsewhere allowed such a feeling, as it were, to escape him, but had never recognized it as an article of his faith. In Virgil it approaches more nearly to a consciously held belief, or at least to a possible solution of the mystery of Nature. It has been reserved for modern times to give fuller expression to the same tendency of thought, sometimes as a mere feeling, sometimes as a conviction. But however such a view may have expressed passing phases, either of thought or feeling, it has never, either now or in ancient times, approached to be a solution which can satisfy at once reason, heart, and conscience.

Since these remarks on Virgil were in the press, Professor Sellar's work on Virgil has appeared. If I could have read it before writing

the above pages, I should probably have said more of Virgil's treatment of Nature, or less. As it is, I have allowed what I had said to remain unchanged. Those who wish to see this and every other aspect of Virgil's poetry treated in the most thorough and instructive way, will be amply rewarded by the study of Professor Sellar's book.

CHAPTER XI.

NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND

MILTON.

To pass from the Virgilian view of Nature to that of our earliest English poet, though it brings us nearer our own age in time, is really to recede from it in feeling to a remote and primitive antiquity. No poet ever loved Nature more than Chaucer did; but it was with a simple, unreflective, child-like love. The Morning Star of English Song, as he has been called, man of the world and skilled in affairs, at home in courts and with the great, conversant with the ways of all men, high and low, could turn aside from the gorgeous imagery that filled his poetic vision, from the profusion of medieval ceremonies and cavalcade, of high processions with soldiers in armor, caparisoned horses and bedizened ladies, from gallant knights with lordly manners, and homely country-people, from sights and stories fetched from many lands, to dwell tenderly on the plain sights and sounds of external nature, and to sing of them with the transparency and sweetness of a child. It was Nature in her "first intention," her most obvious aspects, that at

tracted him. Once, indeed, in the " Assembly of Foules," he speaks of "that noble Goddesse of Nature." This, however, is not his usual language, but rather a conventional way of speaking caught from the Latin poets he had read. Again, in a more serious strain, the same poem speaks thus:

Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord;" but it is not on Nature as a great whole, much less as an abstraction, that his thought usually dwells. It is the outer world in its most concrete forms and objects, with which he delights to interweave his poetry- the homely scenes of South England, the oaks and other forest trees, the green meadows, quiet fields, and comfortable farms, as well as the great castles where the nobles dwelt. One associates him with the green lanes and downs of Surrey and Kent, their natural copsewoods and undulating greenery. I know not that the habitual forms of English landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought or sentiment. And his favorite season -it is the May-time. Of this he is never tired of singing. When there comes a really springlike day in May, the east wind gone, and the west wind blowing softly, the leaves coming out, and the birds singing, at such a season one feels instinctively this is the Chaucer atmosphere and