NATURE STUDY AND MODERN VERSE.

THE fashion of the day is for getting out of doors, and those on the doorstep, as it were, are grateful for a guide. Some such reason perhaps accounts for the popularity of writers like Richard Jefferies, who makes dreary enough reading to certain of his countrymen, but who has given an extraordinary amount of pleasure to others. Sir Walter Besant, for instance, could hardly find words to express the debt he felt he owed to the author of the "Pageant of Summer " ; others cannot find much more in it than a string of detail, poured out adjective after adjective, nothing omitted, nothing that is not taken down, so to speak, in shorthand on the spot and neatly copied out in longhand elsewhere. Possibly the same audience which was enthusiastic over Jefferies will also welcome a little book of essays, "Nature Knowledge in Modern Poetry," which has just been published by Mr. Alexander Mackie (Longmans and Co., 2s. Gd. net). The title is a little too comprehensive, for the "modern poetry" is limited to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Lowell. The author would have been better advised, perhaps, to confine himself to the first three, who might be treated as a group naturally and easily, and without leaving open the question of where to draw the line. If you admit Lowell into the comparison, it is difficult to exclude half-a-dozen more,— both the Brownings, for instance, Jean Ingelow, Clough, and Henley are full of "Nature knowledge." Still, with the four it is possible to make up a pleasant enough volume of quotations.

Of the three English poets, which would be generally admitted to possess the largest amount of "Nature know- ledge " ? It is not a very satisfactory phrase, but the meaning at least is clear. The admirer of Richard Jefferies, no doubt, would put Tennyson first, Of all English poets, he is the most minute and exact in his references to birds and trees and flowers, insects and stones and fossils. Generic descrip- tions are never enough for him ; he jewels his verses with particulars, studs his lines with tiny, careful phrasing. In that respect no other English poet equals him. If he and Wordsworth together had stood on a bill above some valley of woods, and heard the birds wake on a morning in April or May, to both poets there would have thrilled up the hill the same wonderful, wild, tumultuous shout of sing- ing, unlike any other sound to be heard by day or night in England. But Wordsworth, although he would have drunk in the glory of the sound, though the insistent echo of the singing would have "haunted him like a passion," would have written of it afterwards as the song of "the birds." To 'Tennyson "the birds" would not be enough. He would have picked out the high clarions of the thrush and missel- thrnsb, the hurrying twitter of the finches, the richer melody of the blackbird, and the small piccolo of the robin. His " Throstle " is, • indeed, the song of the thrush as he heard it :— " Summer is coming, summer is coming, I know it, I know it, I know it, Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,' Yes, my wild little poet."

His eyes would have been open for the tiniest change of tint in the budding trees. The colour of the buds of trees always fascinated him.

"More black than ash-buds in the front of March," is a comparison typical of his keen eye for detail ; and has a more brilliant descriptive line been written of an English

wood, in April than the opening of the fourth part of " Maud " P—

"A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime." ".When rosy plumelets tuft the larch," is another line to be put beside it, with, perhaps, the opening of the "Progress of Spring" "The groundflame of the crocus breaks the mould, Fair Spring slides hither o'er the Southern Sea. . . .

Up leaps the lark, gone wild to welcome her, About her glance the tits, and shriek the jays, Before her skims the jubilant woodpecker, The linnet's bosom blushes at her gaze, While round her brows a woodland culver flits Watching her large light eyes and gracious looks, And in her open palm a halcyon sits Patient—the secret splendour of the brook."

'Or, last, tale these lines from "The Two Voices" :— "To-day I saw the dragon-fly Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil Of his old husk : from head to tail Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings : like gauze they grew; Through crofts and pastures wet with dew A living flash of light he flew."

For pure beauty of colouring and choice of the sovereign word there is nothing in Wordsworth quite like the last two passages. Is there in Matthew Arnold ? In writing of birds and flowers Arnold, perhaps, comes nearest to Tennyson in clearness and sureness of touch and vision. Take this picture, for instance, of a field lying' in the hot white light of an August Sun:- . "Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep."

Or this of a scented garden :— "Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snap-dragon, Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell, And stocks in fragrant bloW."

But the likeness to Tennyson does not, or, rather, could not, run through the whole of Matthew Arnold's writing. Tennyson will probably live as a writer of lyrics : Matthew Arnold in essentials is an elegiac poet. He does not "pipe but as the linnets sing " ; the impulse of his singing is a sad, high serenity of vision, not an urgent voice that must be heard.

S'uffused through and through with the quiet anthem of poets' two thousand years in their graves, he is not urged to out- bursts like the greatest lyric in "Maud." He hears Virgil in the anthem more ' clearly than Sappho, and as they came to

Virgil, so his images of Nature tuning the song of her birds, or painting her woods and valleys, and sending the life of her creatures pulsing through the world come to him more readily as similes than as direct occasions for singing. He does not write a song to the swallow, but the image of swallows flits; across hie vision as he writes of the thin, trooping shades of the dead :— " And as the swallows crowd the bulrush beds . Of some clear river, issuing from a lake, On autumn days, before they cross the sea, And to each bulrush crest a swallow hangs Quivering, and others skim the river-streams,

And their quick twittering fills the banks and shores—

So around Harmed swarmed the twittering ghosts."

Not even Tennyson could be more exact in his detail, or fit More precisely the shining words into their proper frame. But is there not still something lacking, a haunting need of

something stronger and greater and higher, in all then "Nature studies" of the two later poets ? Is it that the

exquisite details, the recurring grace-notes, prevent,' hamper the sounding 'out of great master-chords that ring and remain'?

Is he permitted the highest vision of all whose eye falls so easily on the foreground ? Wordsworth, who wrote and was satisfied with thousands of lines that Tennyson would have torn up, had not the eye to mark the detail that attracted Tennyson and Arnold. He did not notice the foreground, because he was looking beyond. He was filled with "A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the livinc, air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

In that large vision, detail escapes him. He is even, occasion- ally, quaintly mistaken on matters of common knowledge, as when, for instance, he writes of a wren's nest--

" The very nest In which this child of spring was reared Is warmed through winter by her feathery breast."

He mentions by name a dozen flowers where Tennyson and Arnold make charming use of a hundred. He noticed, perhaps, hardly more than three or four kinds of daffodils, whereas Tennyson, you feel, would almost have enjoyed making specimen verses out of the Latin names in a bulb-grower's catalogue. To that extent his "Nature knowledge" was deficient; but it is he who, of the three poets, is granted the purest vision in that unequalled poem of flowers, in which "They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude, And then my heart with pleasure rills And dances with the daffodils."