quarter of tliis century, that I find it hard to pass by.
Much as 1 love to bring to mind, over and over again,
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816 WET DAYS,
» lYanhoe" and .^ Waverley,'' I love quite as much ta
Buimnon to my view Walter Scott, the woodsman of
Abbotsfordy with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound
Maida in attendance. I see hhn thinning out the sap-
lings that he has planted upon the Tweed banks. I
can fancy how the master would have lopped away the
boughs for a litUe looplet through which a burst of the
blue Eildon Hills should come. His favorite seat,
overshadowed by an arbor-vitse, (of which a leaf lies
pressed in the ^ Scotch Tourist" yonder,) was so near
to the Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over
its pebbly bottom must have made a delightful lullaby
for the toil-worn old man. But beyond wood-craft, I
could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong
agricultural inclination ; indeed, in one of his letters,
dated about the time of his commercial involvement,
(1826,) he says, — after enumerating other prospective
retrenchments, — "then I give up an expensive farm,
tahieh I always hatedj and turn all my odds and ends
into cash." * Again, (and I coimt this a surer indica-
tion,) he puts in the mouth of Cromwell (" Woodstock ")
a mixed metaphor of which no apt farmer could have
been guilty. The Puritan general is speaking of the
arch - loyalist Dr. BocheclifiTe, and says, "I know his
Btiffneckedness of old, though I have made him plough
Id mjfurrowy when he thought he was turning up hii
• Lockhart*8 Lifi, Vol. IV. elu I.
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A BEVY OF POETS. 317
uwn iwathe,^ Nor do I think that the old gentlemaD
had much eye for the picturesque ; no hindscape-gar-
dener of any reputation would have d^ided upon such
a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford : * the spot
is low; the views are not extended or varied ; the very
trees are all of Scott's planting ; but the master loved
the murmur of the Tweed, — loved the nearness of
Melrose, and in every old bit of sculpture that he
walled into his home he found pictures of fiu'-away
scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey
all his limited horizon.
Christopher .North carried his Scotch love of moun-
tains to his home among the English lakes. I think
he counted Skiddaw something more than ** a great
creature.** In all respects — saving the pipes and the
ale — he was the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And
yet do we love him more? A stalwart, hearty man,
with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who could
<*put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the
hardiest of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with, the
daintiest of the Low-Country flshers, — redimdant of
imagination, redundant of speech, ard with such exii-
« This it tbe mora remarkable as Scott wrote most appraciathrely
on Uie subject of landscape-gardening. I allude particnlarly to that
channing essaj of his in the QaarUrly Review ibr March, 1828, based
npon Sir Henry Stanart's schemer for the safe removal of lai^ge fbrest*
trees, — a scheme which unfortunately promised more than it has per
formed.
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B18 WET DATS.
berance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow
as at the reading of Spenser's ^ Faery Queene," and
lay him down with a wearisome sense of mental indi-
gestion.
Nor yet, is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of
plethora, due less to the frothiness of the condiments
than to a certain fulness of blood and brawn. The
broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a
dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,)
strides away along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch
Lochy with such a tearing pace, and greets every lassie
with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws
such a wonderful stretch of Une upon every pool, and
amazes us with such stupendous <' strikes ** and such a
whizzing of his reel, that we fairly lose our breath.
Not so of the " White Doe of Rylstone " ; nay, we
more incline to doze over it than to lose our breath.
Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe, with
its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quie-
tude and beauty of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Words-
worth was bounded by the slaty banks of the " Crystal
Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments,
was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Words-
worth loved intensely all Uie more beautiful aspects of
the country, and of country-life. No angler and no
gardener, indeed, — too severely and proudly meditap
tive for any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight
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A BEVY OF POETS. »19
which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one which he
carried with him always, — the immense dignity of his
poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were
fairly typical of his tastes : a cottage, (so called,) of
homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation
of gables and of chinmey-stacks ; a velvety sheen of
turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher ; a
mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant
than showy ones ; behind him the loveliest of wooded
hills, all toned down by graceful culture, and before
him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and Rydal-
Water.
We have to credit him with some rare and tender de<-
scription, and fragments of great poems ; but I cannot
help thinking that he fancied a profounder meaning lay
in them than tlie world has yet detected.
John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and
was most essentially a poet of the fields. His father
was a pauper and a cripple ; not even young Cobbett
was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his
birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He
wrote verses upon the lining of his hat-band. He
hoarded hal^ence to buy Thomson's ^Seasons," and
walked seven miles before sunrise to make the pur-
chase. The hardest field-toil could not repress the
poetic aspirations of such a boy. By dint of new
boardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own
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MO WET DAYS.
but nobody read them. He wrote other verses, irUdi
at length made him known. The world flattered die
peasant -bard of Northamptonshire. A few distin-
guished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a
farm of his own. The heroine of his love-tales became
its mistress ; a shelf or two of books made him rich ;
but in an evil hour he entered upon some fann-specu-
ktion which broke down ; a new poem was sharply
criticised or neglected; the novelty of his peasant's
song was over. Disheartened and gloomy, he was over-
whelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of
a mad - house, where for forty years he has staggered
idiotically toward the rest which did not come. But
even as I write I see in the British papers that he is
free at last Poor Glare is dead.
With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest
which perhaps its merit alone would not provoke his
Bttle' sonnet of " The Thrush's Nest " : —
** Within a thick and spreading ]lawthom-b1l8l^
That overhung a mole-hill laige and round,
I heard from mom to mom a meny thmah
Sing h^rmns of rapture, while I drank the sonnd
With J07; and oft, an imintmding guest,
I watched her secret toils from day to day, ^
How trae she warped the moss to fomi her nett,
And modelled it within with wood and day,
And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew.
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowem,
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A BEVY OF POETS. S%1
Isk-fpotted OTW, ahena of giean and Una;
And there I witneaaed, in the anmmer homs,
A brood of Kature'a minatreU chirp and fly,
Glad aa the aonahine and the laughing akj.**
There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in
Bunt's poem of ^ Rimini,'' wha«
** Ay, earth, and aea
Breathe like i bright-eyed fiwe that langfaa out openly.
*Tia Katnre ftiH of apirita, waked and qninging:
Hm birda to the deUdoiia tone are ainging,
Darting with freaka and anatchea np and down,
Where the light wooda go aeawaid ftom the town;
While happy &ce8 atiiking through the green
Of leafy toada at every turn axe eeen;
And the flff ahips, lifting tiieir aaila of white
Like joyftd hands, come up with acatteiy light,
Gome gleaming up tme to the wiahed-fbr day,
And chaae the whbtling brine, and awhl into the bay.**
This does ttot sound as if It came from the prince of
oocknexB ; and I have always Mi a certain regard foi
Ldgh Hunt, loo^ by reason of the tender story which
he gives of the littkgarden, ^ mu> piedol wrto^ that he
established during his two years of priscmhood.*
But, after all^ tibere was no robustness in his rural
spirit^ — no&ing that makes the dieek tingle, as if a
smart wind had smitten it He was bom to handle
roses without thorns ; I think that with a pretty boudoir
• LmrdByrm andhU GmUmi/orariet, YoL 11. p. 96S.
81
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i
822 WET DAYS.
on whose table every morning a pretty maid should
arrange a pretty nosegay, and with a pretty canary to
sing songs in a g^ded cage, and pretty gold-fish to dis-
port in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for dinner,
his love for the comitry would have been satisfied. He
loved Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman
of twice his years, — sighing himself away in pretty
phrases that flatter, but do not touch her ; there is noth-
ing to remind, even, of the fiill, aboimding, fiery, all-
conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and
marries a yielding maiden.
In poor John Keats, however, there is something of
this; and under its heats he consumed away. For
ripe, joyous outburst of all rural &ncies, — for keen
apprehension of what most takes hold of the suscepti-
bilities of a man who loves the country, — for his coin-
age of all sweet sounds of birds, all murmur of leaves,
all riot and blossoming of flowers, into fragrant verse,
— he was without a peer in his day. It is not that he
is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets,
not that he sees all, not that he has heard all ; but his
heart has drunk the incense of it, and his imagination
refined it, and his fancy set it aflow in those jocund
Imes which bound and writhe and exult with a passion
ate love for the things of field and air.
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VBNVOl 8SS
VEnwn.
I CLOSE tliese papers, with my eye resting upon the
same stretch of fields, — the wooded border of a
river, — the twinkling roo& and spires flanked by hlUs
and sea, — where my eye rested when I began thb story
of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches
of Ithaca. And I take a pleaswe in feeling that the
fiirm-practice over all the fields below me rests upon the
cumulated authorship of so long a line of teachers.
Ton open furrow, over which the herbage has closed,
carries trace of the ridging in the " Works and Days " ;
the brown field of half-broken clods is the follow (Ncos)
of Xenophon; the drills belong to Worlidge; their
culture with the horse-hoe is at the order of Master
Tull. Young and Cobbett are fiill of their suggestions ;
Lancelot Brown has ordered away a great straggling
hedge-row; and Sir XTvedale Price has urged me to
spare a hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of
flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and
Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the wall-
ing, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Bums em-
balms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for
me in a tangled wilderness. Enight names my cher-
ries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over
the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hem*
kicks and soft maples, for '< a contemplative man's reo»
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<M WET DATS.
reaJdonJ* Davy long ago caught all the feimentation
of my manure-heap in his retort, and Thomson painted
for me the scene which is under my window to-day.
Mowhray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the songs
of all the birds are caught and repeated to the echo in
the pages of the poets wluch lie here under my hand ;
throi^h the prism of their verse, Patrick the cattle-ten-
der changes to a lithe milkmaid^ against whose ankles
the buttercups nod rejoidngly, and Rosamund (which
is the nurse) wakes all Ardai (wfaidi is Ed^^ood)
widi a rich burst of laughter.
THE BKD.
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