Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/137

 INTRODUCTION cxxxiii ���no strong or novel stimulus, and in this one poem, at least, she has attained to his " wise passiveness," his power of fixing an exquisite regard on the commonest facts of nature, and his ability to state these facts with fine precision, and to interpret them, not allegorically, but actually in their rela- tion to human life. �In a faint but not at all fanciful way, Lady Winchilsea's poetical development is also comparable to that of Words- worth. Most of the men who wrote well of nature in the eighteenth century, as Armstrong, Dyer, Thomson, Ram- say, Mickle, Bruce, Beattie, spent their youth in the country; their poetry of nature was their earliest work and was remi- niscent of their country life ; and the large body of their later work was didactic or dramatic. In other words they wrote their poetry of nature, before, not after, they had come into close contact with the complex and strenuous life of the city. Lady Winchilsea's experience was exactly the reverse. She first knew the court and the city ; she first knew the tragic realities of life, and she first wrote dramas and satires and odes ; and then at fifty years of age she wrote the Reverie. She was, in her spiritual history, like Wordsworth in that her chief poems on nature were not written in the flush and fervor of youth. Personal deprivations, frus- trated ambitions, loss of faith in man, doubts of the provi- dential ordering of human affairs, were the deep waters through which she was called to pass, and the end of the bitter experience found her in a state of dejection border- ing on despair, a condition similar in kind though not in degree to Wordsworth's condition at the close of the experi- ences connected with the French revolution. The influences that led to healing in each case were human affection and the beauty and order of the external world. To her hus- band and to East well Park Lady Winchilsea owed her resto- ration to her birtright of serenity and joy. But the process ��� �