Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/220

190 less effectively, when his interpretation is premeditated, than certain bards whose side-glimpses of the outdoor world we interpret for ourselves. Their chance strokes are matchless. The classic isles and waters are all before us in the "Odyssey," characterized broadly and truthfully by essential traits. Attica glows and glooms in the choruses of "Œdipus at Colonos" and "The Clouds;" we have the atmosphere that suffuses her landscape, action, personages. Its tone is just as capturable now as two thousand years ago under the sky of Sophocles and Aristophanes. The phonograph passes no more intelligibly to after time the living voice of a Gladstone '''"Descriptive" poets. Cp. "Poets of America": p. 46.''' or a Browning. Rarely is there an avowedly descriptive poet who achieves much more than the asking you to take his word for a mass of details. To come near home, this was what such American landscapists as Street and Percival usually succeeded in doing; while Lowell, with his quick eye and Greek good-fellowship with nature, always keeps us in mind of her as a blithe companion by his side when he chats to us, and whether on the rocks of Appledore, or under the willows, or along the snow-paths of a white New England night. Cowper got nearer to truth than Thomson; he pointed to the naturalness that Wordsworth sought in turn,—and found. As for Burns, he lay in nature's heart, and—whether with or without design expressed her as simply and surely as the bards of old.