Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/136

 cxxxii INTRODUCTION ���In an early poem, The Echo, Lady Winchilsea expressed �a quite romantic pleasure in a walk taken on a fair night to �hear a certain famous echo, but in the actual �experience it was not so much the mechanical �perfection of the sound that pleased her, as it was its remote, �elemental suggestiveness when associated with the loneliness �and beauty of the night. In Democritus one line, �Solitary walks on starry nights, �seems to have a personal touch as if she had known such walks. The Hymn strikes a somewhat deeper note in its address to the moon as the gentle guide of �Silent night, That does to solemn Praise and serious thoughts invite. �Brief though these references are, each one has a quality of originality. But they hardly even foreshadow the perfection of the Nocturnal Reverie. The fullness and delicate accuracy of the observation in this poem have already been sufficiently commented on. The description is doubtless the outcome of many a fair summer night at Eastwell, but the picturesque details are unified into a consistent whole, so that they give the impression of a single vivid experience. The style is simple, straightforward, unelaborated, almost bare. There is nothing traditional or bookish. There is no ecstacy, no emphatic statement. But in some indefinable, inevitable fashion the little poem is suffused with the charm of the lovely night. And not only the charm of the night, but its significance, its message, its gift to man, find adequate expression. The eight lines beginning, "When a sedate content the spirit feels," present an interpretation of the effect of nature on the heart and mind of man so exactly Wordsworthian in substance and mood that it is hard to date it eighty-five years before the Lyrical Ballads. Words- worth's strong interest in Lady Winchilsea is justified by the law of affinities. She is like him in that her genius needs ��� �