Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/127

 INTRODUCTION cxxiii ���There are no good descriptions except, possibly, this line on the ocean in a calm, �For smooth it lay as if one wave made all the sea. �The treatment of mountains is equally ineffective. In her Hymn she does, however, address mountains as "Ye native altars of the Earth," a phrase which in the midst of utilitarian and theological objections to mountains as " huge, monstrous excrescences of nature," as mere "barriers between one sweet plain and another," as "wild, vast, undigested heaps of stone and earth," " great ruins, the result of sin," has a strangely exalted and Hebraic sound. �Dryden and his followers used storm similes with weari- some frequency and monotony, but storms themselves were not counted poetical property till Thomson called attention to them in The Seasons, after which they became part of the stock in trade of every poet- aster who could make the elements crash and hurtle. Lady Winchilsea's one storm is her description of the hurricane that swept over England in November, 1703, devastating the southern counties, uprooting fine old trees, unroofing palaces, destroying a third of the navy, and causing the death of fifteen hundred seamen. Eastwell was within the storm radius, and the poem is doubtless based on actual obser- vation. This poem was subjected to much revision in the manuscript, but even in the printed form it is still unequal and disjointed. It was written too near to the event. It is marred by much that is local, personal, temporary in inter- est. The best passages are descriptive of external nature pure and simple, the fierce and turbulent winds, the ruined trees, the storm-beaten birds. But one point calls for especial comment here, and that is the emphasis put on the sounds of the tempest. They are so appalling and tremen- dous as to " wound the listening sense." They have the effect ��� �