VII

There are moments when one can read neither Milton nor Spenser, moments when one recollects nothing but that their flesh had partly been changed to stone, but there are other moments when one recollects nothing but those habits of emotion that made the lesser poet especially a man of an older, more imaginative time. One remembers that he delighted in smooth pastoral places, because men could be busy there or gather together there, after their work, that he could love handiwork and the hum of voices. One remembers that he could still rejoice in the trees, not because they were images of loneliness and meditation, but because of their serviceableness. He could praise ‘the builder oake,’ ‘the aspine, good for staves,’ ‘the cypresse funerall,’ ‘the eugh, obedient to the bender’s will,’ ‘the birch for shaftes,’ ‘the sallow for the mill,’ ‘the mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound,’ ‘the fruitful olive,’ and ‘the carver holme.’ He was of a time before undelighted labour had made the business of men a desecration. He carries one’s memory back to Virgil’s and Chaucer’s praise of trees, and to the sweet-sounding song made by the old Irish poet in their praise.

I got up from reading the Faerie Queene the other day and wandered into another room. It was in a friend’s house, and I came of a sudden to the ancient poetry and to our poetry side by side—an engraving of Claude’s ‘Mill’ hung under an engraving of Turner’s ‘Temple of Jupiter.’ Those dancing country-people, those cow-herds, resting after the day’s work, and that quiet mill-race made one think of Merry England with its glad Latin heart, of a time when men in every land found poetry and imagination in one another’s company and in the day’s labour. Those stately goddesses, moving in slow procession towards that marble architrave among mysterious trees, belong to Shelley’s thought, and to the religion of the wilderness—the only religion possible to poetry to-day. Certainly Colin Clout, the companionable shepherd, and Calidor, the courtly man-at-arms, are gone, and Alastor is wandering from lonely river to river finding happiness in nothing but in that star where Spenser too had imagined the fountain of perfect things. This new beauty, in losing so much, has indeed found a new loftiness, a something of religious exaltation that the old had not. It may be that those goddesses, moving with a majesty like a procession of the stars, mean something to the soul of man that those kindly women of the old poets did not mean, for all the fulness of their breasts and the joyous gravity of their eyes. Has not the wilderness been at all times a place of prophecy?