Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/135

 INTRODUCTION cxxxi ������represented as "convulsed with grief" at the death of the illustrious human being. The rivulets are flooded with tears of the water-gods, brows of hills are furrowed by new streams, the heavens weep, birds droop, lilies hang their heads. Dr. Johnson characterizes such passages as " sylla- bles of senseless dolour." Their grotesque extravagance and unreality become even more apparent when they are put side by side with the direct recognition of the truth, the daring, almost painful frankness in such lines as those in which Wordsworth declares the indifference of Nature to the death of sweet Lucy, whose body is �Rolled round in Earth's diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees. �The transition from the artificial subordination of nature to man, to the conception of nature as a vital and separate entity, was the slow process of a century. Lady Winchil- sea's place in this historical sequence becomes then of especial significance, when we find in her poems not only a forecast of the modern thought, but a protest against the conventional idea. In an elegy commemorative of her relative, Sir William Twysden, she says she rejects the custom- ary invocation to flocks and fields and flowers to join her in her grief because to her mind it is false and but a poet's dream that eternal nature is moved by man's sorrow. She is con- scious that no human woe can deprive the spring of joy in her fragrant odors and purple violets. It is in vain that mourners attempt to force on inanimate things some portion of their grief. Nature, unconcerned for our sorrows, " per- sues her settled path, her first and steady course." That all may seem to die with the death of a friend is, she admits, true, but she insists, with the emphasis of Coleridge in the Ode to Dejection, that the clouds darkening over the outer world proceed only from the sad, awakened heart. ��� �