sonne, as for a space,A cloudy thought gan through his soule pace."
Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire cas-tel faste by the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In the Knight's Tale, the wild picturesque
is employed again to connote the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the passage,[18] had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the God of War:
"First on the wal was peynted a forest
In which there dwelleth neither man nor best, With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to biholde, In which ther ran a rumbel and a swough,
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As though a storm sholde bresten every bough."
Nothing even in Childe Roland sketches desolating natural effects with more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of the author of Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght. But the poem marks on the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness, united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual, though much of
course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be difficult to point
out passages in the whole range of mediaeval literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of the northern
winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird mission.
A forest full deep, and wild to a wonder,
High hills on each side, and crowded woods under, Of oaks hoar and huge, a hundred together.
The hazel and hawthorne were grown altogether
Everywhere coated by moss ragged, rough; Many birds on bare branches, unhappy enough; That piteously piped there, for pain of the cold. [19]
Wondrous fair was the earth, for the frost lay thereby; On the mist ruddy gleams the sun cast, as on high
He coasted full clearly the clouds of the sky.
They beat along banks where the branches are bare, They climbed along cliffs where clingeth the cold, The clouds yet held up, but 'twas ugly beneath.
Mist lowered on the moor, dissolved on the mountains. Each hill had a hat, a huge misty cloak.
Brooks boiling and breaking dashed on the banks, Shattered brightly on shore.
That is what we find in the North, and such English feeling for the sublime is nothing new; it goes far back beyond these lines into
the generations that seem misty as the air which their poets are wont to describe. Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume on Anglo-Saxon poetry makes it unnecessary to enter into the subject of old England's eye and ear for nature. Its accounts of the sympathy for the bold and fierce bear out what one might guess without knowledge--that the stern northern climate and familiarity with ocean
life found large poetical expression. Luxury, southern artifice of sentiment and literary manner, had not invaded the rugged men of
the North; they delight in describing elemental conflicts, and sometimes with studied elaboration. But if the pictures of the German and French poets are uniform in their mildness, those of these Anglo-Saxons are marked by their stormy aspect. We exchange spring for winter.
The same contrast holds true when we take up the Scandinavian poets; they show much feeling and power, but little susceptibility to the beauty of gentleness and grace. Mr. Brooke has remarked upon a similarity between the Tempest of Cynewulf and Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. A closer parallel may be[20] observed in the Lines Among the Euganean Hills and the so-called Helgi poet; where we find a curiously identical image of rooks and hawks flying into the early morning with wings sparkling from the mists through which they have passed. The Norse poems are fond of screaming eagles, and ravens on the high branches.
That weird northern imagination too has vivid pictures, as the shields of the night-warriors shining in the waning moon. Nature also occasionally speaks to their personal moods, both by harmony and contrast. A poet's boat is swept fiercely by the tempest, as he dies with thoughts of his "linen-clad lady" in his heart. Another watches the sea dashing against the steep cliff, and thinks of his
far-away love, in the control of his rival. Like the early English, they feel exultation in sea and storm. They know them intimately and their descriptions are spirited and faithful. They love them, but they love fiercely, terribly, as they do their women. Yet even as in their human passions, there are tranquillities. "They rode their steeds through dewy dales and dusky glens: the air, a sea of mist, shook
as they passed by." We linger behind the storming horsemen for a moment, to look back as the silence steals in again through those dusky glens.
But to return to what is our real subject, the sentiment for nature in what we may term the polite literatures of mediaevalism. The reason for their feeling about winter is summed up in one of the Latin student songs, "the cold icy harshness of winter, its
fierceness, and dull, miserable inactivity." It kept them within, when their interests and concerns were so mainly out-of-door. The po-
ets[21] are for ever singing in praise of spring, not so much because they loved it for itself, as because it brought them a life that was gay and easy. They seldom introduce touches of appreciation in their descriptions of the wintry season. Snow may have appeared
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lovely to them, but we observe Dante as doing something singular when he compares the talking of ladies, which was mingled with sighs and tears, to raindrops interspersed with beautiful snowflakes (cp. Inf., 14, 30; 24, 5), and one of the most memorable lines in his friend Guido Cavalcanti's poems is the one which mentions the dreamy sinking down of snow, falling when the air is windless. The old-time gentlemen apparently hugged the fire and drank of "their bugle-horn the wyn," and ate "brawn of the tusked swyn," when winter came, instead of watching the snow, through their little windows.
There are many phases of nature which it seems to us impossible not to notice and enjoy, of which we seldom find a trace. We should expect them in the large body of lyrical verse, and still more in the copious romance literature, which corresponds to the modern novel, both in incident and in the invitation to bits of passing local color. Clouds, for instance, aside from their glory of line and mass, and the grace and loveliness of their lighter forms, are curious and oddly suggestive, as Antony reminds Eros, and
they are constantly before the eye; yet let any reader of mediaeval poetry recall how imperceptible a part they play in it, even as plain facts of description. A line in one of the Latin songs expresses the feeling: their thought of clouds is, how delightful not to see
them. Moonlight,
