But in a well-known passage, in which Lucretius is honoured as he deserves, we find nevertheless a different view hinted, with an impressiveness which it had hardly acquired till then. We find Virgil implying that scientific knowledge of Nature may not be the only way of arriving at the truth about her; that her loveliness is also a revelation, and that the soul which is in unison with her is justified by its own peace. This is the very substance of _The Poet's Epitaph_ also; of the poem in which Wordsworth at the beginning of his career describes himself as he continued till its close,--the poet who "murmurs near the running brooks a music sweeter than their own,"--who scorns the man of science "who would peep and botanize upon his mother's grave."
The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart,-- The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
But he is weak, both man and boy, Hath been an idler in the land; Contented if he might enjoy The things which others understand.
Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage in the second _Georgic_ to which I have referred is in its essence more modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity involved a divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the nature within. With the rise of the modern spirit delight in the external world returns; and from Chaucer downwards through the whole course of English poetry are scattered indications of a mood which draws from visible things an intuition of things not seen. When Wither, in words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, says of his muse,--
By the murmur of a spring, Or the least bough's rustelling; By a daisy whose leaves spread, Shut when Titan goes to bed; Or a shady bush or tree,-- She could more infuse in me Than all Nature's beauties can In some other wiser man,--
he felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some sense of her mysterious whole.
Passages like this, however, must not he too closely pressed. The mystic element in English literature has run for the most part into other channels; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it was in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have mere picturesqueness,--a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of reproducing her,--a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks on Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory to the expression of human love and woe. Cowper sometimes contemplated her as a whole, but only as affording a proof of the wisdom and goodness of a personal Creator.