Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/233

Rh worship, and, as an artist, to imaginative mysticism. Heine, Longfellow, Swinburne, have read the secret of the sea. To Landor, Emerson, and Lowell the tree is animate; in their presence the Illustrations. flower has rights: they would not fell the one nor pluck the other. But there were two English poets whose respective temperaments answered perfectly to the two conditions of nature embraced in Lord Bacon's profound observation, that "In nature things move violently to their place and calmly in their place." Byron's fitful genius was Byron's impetuous unrest. stirred by her violence of change. The rolling surges, the tempest, the live thunder leaping from peak to peak, mated the restlessness of a spirit charged with their own intensity of motion and desire. Wordsworth felt the sublimity of Wordsworth's repose and visionary power. the repose that lies on every height, of nature's ultimate subjection to law. His imagination comprehended her reserved forces; and before his time her deepest voice had no apt interpreter, for none had listened with an ear so patient as his for mastery of her language. His announcement that

was like a revelation. That he had purged himself of all such baseness was his absolute conviction; in such matters he was a kind of Gladstone among the poets of his day. Therefore, self-contemplation, or,