The details of this listless, luxurious description are such as are combined and recombined in many a picture of supposedly English scenes. The poet found his pleasure in the vague, highly generalized representation of such scenery as might exist in some imagined Elysium or Garden of Eden. The final effect on the mind of the reader is never one of reality. All is traditional and bookish. Perhaps there is no more effective way of showing the general characteristics of these poetical descriptions than by an accumulation of examples. Since there is no danger of spoiling the poetry, it may be permissible for purposes of emphasis, to print in italics such phrases as belong to the common poetical stock. The first passage is Rosamond’s description of Woodstock Park:

Here the union of phrases, all conventional in their character, is entirely fortuitous and undiscriminating. It is impossible not to feel that Addison picked up his items at random, according to the scheme of his verse. Take next this invocation by Broome:

Or Shenstone’s description of the place of his birth:

Or Lyttleton’s lines:

Or Congreve’s description of the scenery along the Thames:

Or Parnell’s

Or Prior’s

Or Pope’s

Or Marriott’s

Further quotation is useless. It is easy to see that these passages have no individuality. They might be transposed from poet to poet without injustice either to poem or poet. They are like ready-made clothing, cut out by the quantity to fit the average figure, and never having any niceness or perfection of fit for any individual form. They are not specific. They have no local color. They are, furthermore, absolutely superficial. There is no hint of anything deeper than the conventional external details mentioned.

Throughout the classical age the most genuine interest in Nature had to do with parks and gardens. The formal garden, however, which held its own in England till early in the eighteenth century, makes but a small figure in the poetry of the period. Its affinities were rather with prose. In later poetry we find many references to the classical garden, but they are of the nature of a scornful retrospect, and they belong to the new spirit. The subject of gardening will be presented in a separate section.

In the study of the evolution of the love of Nature from Waller to Wordsworth we may perhaps mark out three stages in the attitude toward the external world. The last of these stages is the one based on the cosmic sense, or the recognition of the essential unity between man and Nature. Of this Wordsworth stands as the first adequate representative. The second stage is marked by the recognition of the world about us as beautiful and worthy of close study, but this study is detailed and external rather than penetrating and suggestive. Very much of the work of the transition period is of this sort. In the first stage Nature is counted of value chiefly as a storehouse of similitudes illustrative of human actions and passions. This first stage represents the use of Nature most characteristic of the classical poetry.

A study of the abundant similitudes of this period indicates that they were drawn from a very narrow range of natural facts. The lily, the rose, the lark, the nightingale, the wren, bees, stars, drops of dew, the sea in a storm, the oak and the ivy, leaves, the Milky Way—these are the most important sources of similitudes. The poet chose his similes from facts already canonized by long literary service, or from the obvious facts of the park or the town garden. There is, in the second place, little apparent effort to secure accuracy or picturesque effect in the statement of the illustrative side of the simile. The entire emphasis is on the human fact to be illustrated. There is, therefore, in the third place, a failure to perceive subtle or delicately true analogies. In most comparisons the likeness is superficial or it is far fetched. The similes from Nature were not the literary expression of inner congruities. They were consciously sought for as a part of the necessary adornment of poetry. Sheridan says:

It is this elaborate desire for similitudes, together with the small knowledge of nature that led not only to wearisome iteration of the same similes but also to the still more wearisome iteration of the same points of comparison. A rose, for instance, is a perennially beautiful source of comparisons,[97] but in the eighteenth-century poetry it is used almost exclusively either with the lily in matters of the complexion, or by itself as representative of a young maiden. If she is overtaken by misfortune the rose is easily blasted by northern winds. If she is neglected the rose withers on its stalk. If she weeps the rose bends its head surcharged with dew. If she dies young, the rosebud is blasted before it is blown. The words of the “Angry Rose” to the poet gently satirize this prevalence of rose similes.

The nightingale also has a conventional use. He generally represents the poet and is either singing with a thorn against his breast, or is engaged in a musical contest with other birds, in which contest he quickly silences all competitors, or is himself driven away by the clamorous noise of a crowd of common birds. The lark has his own established set of applications. Dryden, Waller, and Savage represent the poet as a lark singing when the sun shines, and Waller suits the figure to the times by making the Queen the Sun.[99] Tickell called himself an artless lark.[100] Cowley professed himself emulous of the lark.[101] Somerville is a morning lark.[102] Wycherley compares both Virgil and Pope to larks.[103] Any Fair One has a voice like a lark, and to Dyer’s delighted ear the maidens who spun English yarn sang like a whole choir of larks.[104] Not infrequently comparisons are drawn from the old custom of daring larks by mirrors or objects that would excite terror.[105] The wren carried aloft on the eagle’s back serves a variety of poetical purposes, but is especially apt when representing a needy poet and some powerful patron.[106] Bees are by far the most prolific source of similitude. Their number, their activity, their stings, their honey-making are all recognized means of illustration.[107]

To express great numbers the most useful similes are drawn from stars, pearly drops of dew, and, most frequently, leaves in autumn.[108] An exceedingly popular simile is that of the oak and ivy, or the elm and the vine.[109] Its use is obvious. The rising and the setting sun represent various forms of prosperity and adversity.[110] From Waller on, the Milky Way typifies virtues so numerous that they shine in one undistinguished blaze.[111] A large class of similitudes is drawn from water in some form. In this respect Dryden is typical. It is surprising to observe how many of his metaphors and similes are based on seas, streams, and storms,[112] and his most excellent use of Nature is in these similitudes, though after going over many of them one comes to feel that they are all made upon much the same pattern. After Dryden conventional comparisons based on floods and angry seas are frequent.

The customary form of the river simile of this period is the comparison of some man’s character, or actions, or literary style to some historic rivers with marked features. Prior uses the rapid Volga to represent the impetuous “young Muscovite,” while he compares his own king to the gentle Thames;[113] and he compares the Romans to the Tyber.[114] Pope scornfully likens Curll to the Uridanus.[115] Cowley compares Jonathan to the fair Jordan.[116] Halifax compares the reign of Charles II to the Thames.[117] Armstrong wishes his own style to combine the qualities of the Tweed and the Severn.[118] Hughes likened his Muse to the wanton Thames.[119] Roscommon thought a dull style was like the passive Soane.[120] Somerville compared Allan Ramsay’s poetry to Avona’s silver tide.[121] Thomson said that De La Cour’s numbers went gliding along in “trickling cadence” and were like the flow of the Euphrates.[122] Chief among similes of this sort is Denham’s well-known apostrophe to the Thames.[123] There is also frequent use of rivers in a more general way, as when Parnell compares the strains of the Psalmist to a rolling river,[124] and Stanhope compares Pope’s style to a gliding river,[125] and Addison compares Milton’s poems to a clean current showing an odious bottom,[126] and Dryden compares Sir Robert Howard’s style to a mighty river.[127] The use of a river as a simile for life is not infrequent. For various purposes the Nile was often used. Its annual overflow and its unknown fountain-head are the chief characteristics drawn upon. The river similes seem as a whole to be more effectively worked out and more gracefully managed than most of the other similes of the period, although they have in no case the beauty and profound symbolism characteristic of the river similes of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and Lowell.

Another common form of comparison is that in which the seasons or the various aspects of the day are used to describe some person. One of the happiest examples is from Marvell.

Later similes are less graceful, but they usually have the antithetical form of expression.[129]

Fairly numerous similes are drawn from trees. Dryden gives typical examples, as,

This equal spread of roots and branches, the heavy fall of a great tree, and the superior height of some tall pine or cedar, are the chief sources of similitudes.

The abundant commonplaces, the fluent ineptitudes, of these eighteenth-century similes did not escape satire in their own day. Now and then a critic looked with scorn upon the ingenious and exhausting attempts of the poet lovers to devise comparisons adequately expressive of the beauty, the fascination, the cruelty, the coldness, the inconstancy, of their Cynthias of the minute. Butler thus notes the tendency of poor and unmeaning metaphors to advance in a mob when female charms were to be depicted:

This easy method of praising a mistress is also humorously described by Ambrose Philips:

And Swift in his “Apollo’s Edict,” 1720, specifically prohibits the use of some of the more wearisomely frequent similitudes. Some of the laws he imposes on the poets of his realm are:

In general we may say of the similitudes of this period that in no other literary form was Nature so widely used, and in no other form with so little beauty and spirit; that they were based on an insufficient and inexact knowledge of Nature; and that they were used without any sympathetic sense of inner fitness.

A further characteristic of the use of Nature in the classical period is a personification of natural objects with the ulterior purpose of making them conscious of the charms or emotions of some person. When such personification arises out of an intimate identification of man with Nature, a subjective recognition of the unity of all existence, or when it is the outgrowth of a supreme passion compelling the phenomena of Nature into apparent sympathy with its own joy or grief, the expression is sure to bear the mark of inner conviction or strong emotion. But when the personification is manifestly a laborious artistic device, when it is based on neither belief nor passion, it must be considered the mark of an age slightly touched by real feeling for nature. And such, in general, were the personifications so freely used in the English classical poetry. There is an artificiality, even a grotesqueness, about some of them that forbids even temporary poetic credence on the part of the reader. A good example is in Waller’s “At Pens-hurst,” where the susceptible deer and beeches and clouds mourn with Waller over the cruelty of his stony-hearted Sacharissa.[133] At the death of any illustrious man or fair lady all Nature was convulsed with grief. When Caelestia died the rivulets were flooded by the tears of the water-gods, the brows of the hills were furrowed by new streams, the heavens wept, sudden damps overspread the plains, the lily hung its head, and birds drooped their wings. When Amaryllis had informed Nature of the death of Amyntas all creation “began to roar and howl with horrid yell.”[134] When Thomas Gunston died just before he had finished his seat at Newington, Watts declared that the curling vines would in grief untwine their amorous arms, the stately elms would drop leaves for tears, and that even the unfinished gates and buildings would weep.[135] In love poetry Nature is frequently represented as abashed and discomfited before the superior charms of some fair nymph. Aurora blushes when she sees cheeks more beauteous than her own. Lilies wax pale with envy at a maiden’s fairness.[136] When bright Ophelia comes lilies droop and roses die before their lofty rival.[137] So the sun, when he sees the beautiful ladies in Hyde Park,

And when that modest luminary is aware of the presence of the fair Maria he

Nature is thus constantly compelled into admiring submission to some Delia or Phyllis or Chloris. Even further than this do the poets go; they make all the beauty of Nature a direct outcome of the lady’s charms. In the gardens at Penshurst the peace and glory of the alleys was given by Dorothea’s more than human grace.[140] No spot could resist the civilizing effect of her beauty. The most charming example of this sort of fanciful exaggeration is in Marvell’s verses on Maria and the Nunappleton gardens.

If later examples of the subordination of Nature to man were so graceful and quaintly tender as this poem of Marvell’s we might simply regard them as permissible instances of pathetic fallacy. But even taken at its best we cannot fail to see that this conception of Nature in its relation to man is quite unlike the dominant conception in the romantic school. In the one case we have the subordination of Nature; in the other the ministry of Nature. A significant comparison might be made between Marvell’s Maria, and Wordsworth’s Lucy.[142] The one is the typical fair maiden ruling over her flower world and inspiring to beautiful life all the gentle Nature forms about her. The other is “Nature’s lady.” Her whole being is molded by her susceptibility to the deeper influences of Nature untouched by art. Maria gives to the external world the charm that it has. Lucy is graced by the spirit of nature with all lovely qualities. But Marvell’s poem is really no fair criterion of the use of Nature in the classical love and elegiac poetry, for in most of that poetry the emotion, the passion, that would justify extravagant or even impossible conceptions is conspicuously absent. The extravagance of speech stood as the sign of an intensity of feeling that did not exist. The poet was not swept away by overwhelming passion. He worked out his verses with conscious deliberation. A lady-love was one of the necessary poetical stage properties, so the poet cast about him for a Phyllis or an Amoret, and then cast about him for something to say to her. Such lines as Waller’s on Dorothea, who is so much admired by the plants that

are at once felt to be merely cold, tasteless hyperbole. The lines do not win a second’s suspension of disbelief. Modes of speech, a conception of Nature, such that high-wrought emotion might justify it, or that might be natural and inevitable when the poet’s thought was ruled by a living mythology, became mere frigid conventionalities when there was no passion, and when the spirits of stream and wood no longer won even poetic faith.

To speak of the poetic diction of the classical poetry has become a commonplace of criticism. By universal consent certain words and phrases seem to have been stamped as reputable, national, and present, and to have formed the authorized storehouse of poetical supplies. If one writer hit out a good word or phrase, it became common property like air or sunshine, and other writers did not waste their time beating the bush for a different form of words. Frequently words in the accepted diction may be traced to some Latin author, but the point to be noted here is that, whatever the origin of the word, its use is incessant. The fatal grip with which certain words clung to the poetical mind in the classical period receives interesting exemplification from a comparison of Chapman’s and Pope’s translations of Homer. It will be observed that in frequent passages Pope uses the words “purple,” “deck,” “adorn,” and “paint,” chief words in the classical poetic diction. But in the corresponding passages in Chapman some other form of words is used. And in most cases Pope’s use of these terms has no warrant in the original. Likewise, in Dryden’s translation of Virgil the stock diction is used when there is no idea or picture in the Latin to call for it and when the use of the stock phraseology results in distinct loss of force or beauty. Compare, for instance, Virgil’s vivid “flavescet” and Dryden’s tame “the fields adorned”[144] used with reference to harvests of ripened grain. Or compare “novis rubeant quam prata coloribus” and “painted meads;”[145] “noctem ducentibus astris,” and “stars adorn the skies.”[146] We find the same spirit illustrated in Dryden’s modernization of Chaucer. The fresh, spontaneous simplicity of a poet like Chaucer serves exceptionally well to show the comparatively insipid and feeble treatment of Nature on the part of those poets who were content to take their expressions, as well as their facts, at second hand. “The briddes” becomes “the painted birds;” “a goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride of painted plumes.” “At the sun upriste” becomes

The same point is well exemplified in some of the changes made by Percy in the Ballads. For instance,

was modernized to,

Full illustration would require much more space than is here at command, but the point to be made is clear, namely, that even when the poet had his natural facts furnished for him, he instinctively put them into the molds of an accepted poetic diction.

By all odds the most frequent and significant words in this stock poetic diction, so far as it has to do with the presentation of nature, are indicative of dress or adornment in some form. The word “paint” is everywhere. Snakes and lizards and birds; morning and evening; gardens, meadows, and fields; prospects, scenes, and landscapes; hills and valleys; clouds and skies; sunbeams and rainbows; rivers and waves; and flowers from tulips to white lilies—nothing escapes. It is little wonder that Somerville called God “the Almighty Painter.”[149] The word “paint” is really an Elizabethan survival, and as such came into the possession of Cowley, whose use of it is absolutely vicious. A rainbow is “painted tears.” The wings of birds are “painted oars.” David after the fight with the giant is “painted gay with blood,” and the blood of the Egyptians lost in the Red Sea “new paints the waters’ name.”[150] “Gaudy” is another word of frequent occurrence. In general the meaning was as now, “ostentatiously fine” as we see in Shakspere’s phrase, “rich but not gaudy,” and in Dryden’s “gaudy pride of painted plumes.” In that sense it was fitly applied to peacocks, and perhaps even to rainbows, but such phrases as “a gaudy fly,”[151] the “gaudy plumage”[152] of falcons; the “gaudy axles of the fixed stars,”[153] the “gaudy month” of May,[154] the “gaudy opening dawn,”[155] the “gaudy milky soil”[156] and the “gaudy Tagus”[157] seem to have no exact meaning. “Bright” might often serve as a synonym, but not in the application of the word to flies and falcons. The word “adorn” is likewise eminently serviceable. Fruit adorns the trees, fleecy flocks adorn the hills, flowers adorn the green, rainbows adorn clouds, blades of grass adorn fields, vegetables adorn gardens, Phoebus adorns the west and is himself adorned with all his light, and Emma’s eyes adorn the fields she looks on. “Deck” is another favorite. Flora’s rich gifts deck the field, herbs deck the spring, and corals deck the deep. Vales, meadows, fields, mountains, rivers, shores, plains, paths, turf, gardens—all are profusely “damasked” or “enamell’d” or “embroidered.” The wings of butterflies and linnets are “gilded.” The rising sun gilds the morn; the gaudy bow gilds the sky; gaudy light gilds the heavens; lightning gilds the storm; meteors and stars gild the night; and a duchess gilds the rural sphere when she condescends to visit the country.

These milliner-like words were not, however, the only ones that the poet could claim as lawful heritage. He knew, for instance, that he could always call honey “a dewy harvest,” or “balmy dew,” or “ambrosial spoils,” and have his hearers know what he meant. His birds, though almost necessarily a “choir,” could be “feathered” or “tuneful” or “plumy” or “warbling” according to his taste. His fish were easily labeled as “finny,” “scaly,” or “watery.”

Breezes were “whispering,” “balmy,” “ambrosial;” zephyrs were “gentle,” “soft,” and “bland;” gales were “odoriferous,” “wanton,” “Elysian;” and no other kinds of winds blew except in storm similes. “Vernal” and “verdant” come in at every turn. From Waller on, the epithet “watery” seems eminently satisfactory to the poetic mind. Dryden may be taken as illustrative. To him the ocean is a “watery desert,” a “watery deep,” a “watery plain,” a “watery way,” a “watery reign.” The shore is a “watery brink,” or a “watery strand.” Fish are a “watery line” or a “watery race.” Sea-birds are “watery fowl.” The launching of ships is a “watery war.” Streams are “watery floods.” Waves are “watery ranks.”[158] The word occurs with wearisome iteration in succeeding poets. It is applied not only to the sea but to rivers, clouds, and rain, to glades, meads, and flowers, to landscapes, to mists, to the sky, to the sun, and to the rainbow. The set phrases for the sky are such as “azure sky,” “heaven’s azure,” “concave azure,” “azure vault,” “azure waste,” “blue sky,” “blue arch,” “blue expanse,” “blue vault,” “blue vacant,” “blue serene,” “aërial concave,” “aetherial vault,” “aërial vault,” “vaulted sky,” “vaulted azure,” with such other changes as may be rung on these words. The chief words applied to stars, “spangle” and “twinkle,” have been already noted. The usual adjectives for streams and brooks are pleasant, easy words like “liquid,” “lucid,” “limpid,” “purling,” “murmuring,” and “bubbling.” “Rural,” “rustic,” and “sylvan” are epithets applied to anything belonging to the country, whether to the hours spent there, the songs of the birds, or the charming country-maidens and their loves, their bowers, their bliss, their toil. “Flowery” is so constantly used as descriptive of brooks, borders, banks, vales, hills, paths, plains, and meads, that it really has not much more meaning than the definite article prefixed to a noun. “Vocal” is applied to vales, shades, hills, shores, mountains, grots, and woodlands. “Pendent” and “hanging” belong to cliffs, precipices, mountains, shades, and woods. “Headlong” and “umbrageous” are favorite adjectives for groves or shades of any sort. “Mossy” applies to grottos, fountains, streams, caves, turf, banks, and so on. “Gray” is the usual descriptive word for twilight, and “brown” for night. “Lawns” are usually “dewy.”

Some words in this poetic diction are no longer much used. “Breathing,” is an example. It usually referred to the air in gentle motion, as “breathing gales,” but we also find “breathing earth,” referring to mists, and “breathing sweets,” and “breathing flowers” or “breathing roses,” where the reference is to perfume. “Maze” and “mazy” are also much used. The Thames and other streams lead along “mazy trains.” The track of the hare is an “airy maze.” Paths meet in narrow mazes and stars unite in a mazy, complicated dance. Milton’s stream flows with “mazy error.” This word “error” is frequently used in its exact derived meaning. In another place Milton speaks of streams that wander with “serpent error.”[159] Blair has a stream that slides along in “grateful errors.”[160] In Falconer the light strays through the forest with “gay romantic error.”[161] In Gay the fly floats about with “wanton errors.”[162] Dyer winds along a mazy path with “error sweet.”[163] Armstrong’s “error” leads him through endless labyrinths.[164] Addison’s waves roll in “restless errors,”[165] and Thomson treads the “maze of autumn with cheerful error.”[166] “Amusive” is a word applied by Pitt to the ocean, and by Mallet to clouds; Shenstone says that country joys “amuse securely.”[167] It seems to be half apologetic in tone in some cases; in others it merely means pleasing. Thomson used the word as verb or adjective several times.[168] We also find it in Parnell.[169] “Lawn” is used in the sense of an open glade in the woods. Even so late as Wordsworth this meaning persists.[170] One unpleasant but not uncommon word is “sweat.” It may be a survival from the metaphysical conceits, for we find in Dr. Donne a reference to the “sweet sweat of roses,” and Cowley has flowery Hermon “sweat” beneath the dews of night. Dryden has flowers sweat at night.[171] Fenton’s flowers