Nature as having a life distinct from ours, and Goldsmith made one step forward to that, when he freed the landscape in his descriptions from the burden of human feeling which Gray, Collins, Beattie, and Warton had imposed on it. The next step, and an immense one, was made by Burns, Crabbe, and Cowper. Leaving Burns aside for separate treatment, I pass on to the two others in whose work we have for the first time Nature distinctly studied and loved for her own sake. The moralizing of Gray on the landscape, the transference of emotion to it by Burns, the sentimental note of Warton, have passed away, and we see Nature as a whole, and separated from Man. Crabbe's poetry of Nature is as direct in description as his poetry of Man. He was a botanist and mineralogist, and his close study of flowers and stones made him look accurately into all things. He paints the very blades of grass on the common, and the trail of the shell-fish on the sand. It is the introduction into our poetry of that minute observation, and delight in minute things in Nature, which is so remarkable in the subsequent poets, which led Coleridge to paint in words the dancing of the sand at the bottom of a tiny spring, and Wordsworth the daisy's shadow on the naked stone, and Shelley the almost invisible globes of vapour which the sun sucks from a forest pool. The difference is that Crabbe writes without the imagination which confers life on the things seen, while the later poets, believing that all Nature was alive, conceived a living spirit in the sand, the daisy, and the vapour. And this distinction, as we shall see, has its force in relation to the poetical theology of Nature. Cowper's natural painting is not like Crabbe's, preRaphaelite. He paints broad landscapes, and his range is as extensive as the scenery he lived among, and often goes beyond it, neither does he disdain minuteness. He also loved Nature for her own sake, and if Crabbe rode, as we are told, sixty miles in twenty-four hours for the sake of catching one glimpse of the sea, Cowper speaks of the love of Nature as an inextinguishable thirst in man, and bringing his religion to bear on it, declares that this love was infused by God into Man at the creation. Therefore now, for the first time in English Poetry, we have got three things-Nature studied as a whole, Nature loved for her own sake, and therefore Nature conceived as a distinct subject for poetical treatment. And when this was done, a distinct Theology of Nature, in our sense of the word, became for the first time possible. Pope had, as we have seen, his own Natural Theology. It was of God's relation to the great whole conceived of as a system which appealed to the intellect and its admiration: and this great whole involved Man and Nature together. When the Poets who came after him little by little divided Nature from Man for separate consideration, and described and dwelt on separate portions of her beauty, they lost the idea of Nature as a whole, and that had to be recovered before a theology of Nature was possible. When it was recovered, as it was by Wordsworth, it was a different conception from that of Pope. Man had been taken out of it. It is plain that as long as Nature was only loved for the feelings it awoke in Man, or for the lessons it gave him, he could not help mingling it up with himself, and there could be no theology of it which was not also a theology of Man. But when it began to be loved for its own sake as separate from us, the poets began to ask, how is God related to it? what is it in Nature which we love? what is the One Spirit in this mighty whole which speaks to us in another voice than that which we hear in our heart? Again, as long as isolated landscapes and things in Nature were alone described, no conception of the whole was formed. When it was, the Poet naturally asked, what is the source of this Oneness of life, in whom is this whole contained? And out of the effort to reply to these questions the distinct theology of Nature in our poetry took its rise. And Moreover, the new attitude of man towards the whole of Nature tended in the poets to make the new theology religious. It was not the attitude of those who reasoned like Pope on what they saw, it was the attitude of those who loved, and were content alone to love. the love ended in worship. Some, like Shelley, not believing in revealed religion, not even being Deists, created an all-pervading Spirit in the world, and would not call it God, nor give it personality, but called it Love and Life, and in the love and worship that they gave it found their religion, and had the emotions of religion. It was not the great Order of Pope which awoke their intellectual admiration, it was the animating Love in Nature which stirred their heart. Others, like Wordsworth, believing in God, saw Him in the loveliness and tenderness and quiet that they loved, and worshipped not the Author of a great system whom they dared not scan, but a Divine Spirit in the Universe-not necessarily personal there, though personal in them-and said, "This Presence which disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, this Wisdom and Beauty, is revealing itself to me. I can listen, I can understand its voice. It is in Nature the same voice, though in a different language, which belongs to God my Father in my heart, and the work it is doing on me is a work of education. Not by reason but by feeling, not by admiration but by love, I make its lessons mine. Therefore I shall give myself wholly, when I am with Nature, to absolute self-forgetful love of her." In that way the theology of Nature became religious, and that reacted in turn on the poetical contemplation of Nature, and made it more loving and more intense. We shall find all this in Wordsworth, but we only find its beginning in Crabbe and Cowper. They had lost, in dividing Man from Nature, Pope's thought of a life immanent in the whole order of things. And in their theology of Nature they were driven to think of it as only "dull matter" in Cowper's phrase, but matter subject to laws which God had ordained. When they looked then at natural things from the Poet's point of feeling, they saw their beauty as the result of this order, and referred the whole to God who directed it from without. Nature was a machine which God had set in motion, but it moved without any living consciousness of its own motion. The last step, therefore, in the poetic theology of Nature had not then been made. The Poets had not reached the stage in which they were forced, not only by their own feelings, but also by the needs of their art, to conceive of the universe beyond themselves as living. Crabbe made no advance towards it; his was the mechanical theory alone of God and the universe. But Cowper, though he held the same theory for the most part, made one step towards the higher view, and he made it through his religion. His intense personality forced him, when under poetic emotion, to lay aside the mechanical theory, and we find passages where he ceases to interpose laws between Nature and God. He transferred from his theological creed the doctrine of the personal superintendence of God over every human life to the realm of Nature, and bringing God directly into contact with it, declared that He maintained its course by an unremitting act. How else could matter seem as if it were alive,— unless impelled To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force, And under pressure of some conscious cause. Nature is but the name of an effect But his special personal theology which abode in worship of Christ, carried him still further; and he makes Christ Himself as the Eternal Word, as the acting Thought of God-the ruler of the universe, and the author of its forms. One spirit, His Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows, But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain, Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues, |