from a remote antiquity. Whichever view we take, it cannot be questioned that the appearance of this poetry gave to all readers of English the thrill of a new and strange emotion about mountain scenery. Whether the poetry was old, or the product of last century, it describes as none other does, the desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland shores or on the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an unbeliever in Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was 'Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent Where sights are rough and sounds are wild In some complaining dim retreat, For fear and melancholy meet.' And such are the scenes which the Ossianic poetry mainly dwells on. Here is a description of a battle 'As hundred winds 'mid oaks of great mountains, As hundred torrents from lofty hills, As clouds in darkness rushing on, As the great ocean tumbling on the shore, So vast, so sounding, dark, and stern, Met the fierce warriors on Lena. The shout of the host on the mountain height Was like thunder on a night of storms, When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens, On the waste whirlwind of the hills.' And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by gleams of tender light 'Pleasing to me are the words of songs, Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone; When slowly rises the sun On the silent flank of hoary Bens The loch, unruffled, far away, Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.'' Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it. Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the minds that were still young at the beginning of this century, adding each a fresh element of feeling, and opening a new avenue of vision into the life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken men's souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they had never done before, 1 From Dr. Clerk's new translation of Ossian. and to love her with a new passion. But original as this impulse in the present century has been, we must not forget how much it owed, both in itself, and in its manifold forms of expression, to the poetry of Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that poetry there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these the popular one was probably the more powerful in moulding the Poetry that was about to be. CHAPTER XIV. WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF THERE are at least three distinct stages in men's attitude towards the external world. First comes the unconscious love of children-of those at least whose home is in the country-for all rural things, for birds and beasts, for the trees and the fields. The next stage is that of youth and early manhood, which commonly gets so absorbed in trade and business, politics, literature, or science,—that is, in the practical work of life, that the early caring for Nature disappears from the heart, perhaps never again to revisit it. The third and last stage is that of-some at least, perhaps of many -men, who, after much intercourse with the world, and after having, it may be, suffered in it, return to the calm, cool places of Nature, and find there a solace, a refreshment, something in harmony with their best thoughts, which they had not discovered in their youth, it may be because they then less needed it. Something like this takes place in the history of the race. Not to mention the savage state, men Р in the primeval era, when history first finds them, are affected by the visible world around them much as we see children and boys now are. Nature is almost everything to them. They use the forces, and receive the influences of it, if not in a wholly animal way, yet in a quite unconscious, unreflecting way. Then advancing civilisation creates city life and affairs, in which man, with his material, social, and mental interests, takes the place of Nature, which then retires into the background. The love of it either wholly disappears or becomes a very subordinate matter. So it has been, so it still is, with whole populations, which know nothing beyond the purlieus of great cities. But probably the intensest feeling for Nature is that which is engendered out of the heart of the latest, perhaps over-refined, civilisation. An age that has been over-civilised turns away from its too highlystrung interests, its too feverish excitements, to find a peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the equability of Nature. Vinet has well said that the more the soul has been cultivated by social intercourse, and especially the more it has suffered from it, the more, in short, society is disturbed and agonised, the more rich and profound Nature becomes,-mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her from out the ardent and tumultuous centre of civilisation.' Towards the end of last century Europe had reached this third stage. In all the foremost |