Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/126

 cxxii INTRODUCTION ���pelled her to seek wholesome country air, Shenstone's lady who "could not breath anywhere else but in town," Little- ton's fair maiden to whom country life is " supinely calm and dully innocent," Young's Fulvia who preferred "smoke and dust and noise and crowds " to " odious larks and night- ingales," Browne's Celia who makes her banishment from the city endurable by not giving herself up to " dull land- scape" but by thinking of the country as the "town in miniature" these ladies represent in varying phases the traditions of their fathers, and Almeria is legitimately of their kin. She secretly ridicules Ardelia's "rural tastes" and "rustic" clothes, and wonders how anyone can leave "the beaux-monde and the dull country love," yet, "if but an afternoon 'twould cost," she really could bring herself to visit Ardelia in the country, " to quit the town, and for that Time be lost." The attitude of these ladies toward the coun- try was but the attitude of their time. Ardelia's feeling toward city and country becomes, then, novel in the extreme. In the midst of all the social delights Almeria can offer her, she longs for her "groves and country walks" where "trees blast not trees nor flow'rs envenom flow'rs," and she returns to Eastwell with a haste and pleasure hardly to be under- stood by her contemporaries. The antithesis between the town and the country was not so sharply denned by any succeeding poet before Cowper. �The importance of Lady Winchilsea's contributions to the poetry of external nature depends not so much on the The Mountains number as upon the characteristics of the and the Sea poems that have to do with the out-door world. In some respects these characteristics are like those of her contemporaries. The mountains and the sea, for instance, are treated by her in conventional fashion. She uses the sea in similitudes where storms rage and where tides swal- low up brooks, much in the manner of Dryden and Waller. ��� �