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?