Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/240

210 as in a house of worship, with a host of others like ourselves, we have more of him incarnate in humanity; whence comes a strange exaltation, and at times almost a yearning to be reabsorbed in the infinite being from which our individual life has sprung.

The aspect and sentiment of nature, more than Nature the sovereign of modern art and song. other incentives to mental elevation, have supplied a motive to the artistic expression of the last half century. In the domains of the painter and the poet, and on both sides of the Atlantic, the idealization of nature has been, as never before, supreme. Never has she been portrayed on canvas as by Turner and his successors; never has she received such homage in song as that of the English and American poets from the time of Wordsworth. Two significant advantages confirmed Wordsworth's influence: first, that of longevity, which, in spite of the ancient proverb, is the best gift of the gods to an originative leader; second, the fact that, with brief exceptions, he made verse his only form of expression. No wonder that he produced an "ampler body "of good poetry—and of prosaic verse as well—than "Burns, or Keats, or Manzoni, or Heine." But in this country, also, the force of nature has been sovereign, since Bryant first gave voice to the spirit of the glorious forest and waters of a relatively primeval land. During an idyllic yet speculative period, the maxim that "the proper study of mankind is man" has for many reasons been almost in abeyance. At last it is again