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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 ceascless service by a ceaseless force,

And under pressure of some conscious cause.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the Life of all that lives.

Nature is but the name of an effect
Whose cause is God.

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,
Rules universal Nature. Not a flower

But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain,

Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires

Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues,

And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the seaside sands

The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.

We have now made, you observe, a step further. Nature, it is true, is not yet alive, but a spirit of life is now in it, separate from it, but working in it. So near, in fact, have we got to the conception of Nature as alive, that Cowper is betrayed unconsciously into phrases which mingle God up with the universe and make it living. The lines above, which speak of the diffusion of God through all, are repeated in idea in this other phrase:

There lives and works

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

It is

This is a contradiction of his position of a God wholly distinct from the universe, but it marks the transition to the last step in the poetic idea of Nature. the conception of Nature as a living Being to whom affection was due, who could of herself awake feeling and thought in Man, whom we could love as we love our fellow-men, who lived her own life and had conscious pleasure in it—it is this conception which unconsciously in Cowper began to tremble into being. It sprang into full being in Wordsworth, and then, when Nature was conceived of as alive, its theology took a new form, or rather several forms-each modified by the personal theology or philosophy of the Poet-in the poetry of England.

I shall trace that through Wordsworth and Shelley; we shall see how it influenced or did not influence the poetry of Byron and Keats; I shall mark the transitional

position of Coleridge with regard to it; but before I enter upon it, I must discuss, not only how far Cowper carried the poetry of Man and how he made it theological, but also how far his theology influenced his personal poetry. That will form the subject of my next Lecture.

LECTURE III.

COWPER.

I TRACED in my first lecture the growth of the Poetry of Man from the critical school to Cowper. In Cowper's hands, it took a much wider development. I only laid down the larger lines of its growth, omitting for the sake of clearness a number of branch lines, such as that of the new interest taken in the romantic past, which, touched by Macpherson in his "Ossian," and by Chatterton in his forgeries, was afterwards fully worked out in narrative poetry by Sir Walter Scott: such as the ballad, which chose a short narrative of human passion and related it with simplicity and intensity-or the shorter lyric, which in its treatment of a passing phase of meditative or violent passion of the heart, and in its strict limitation of itself within that phase, so as to preserve what is called lyrical unity, is strictly analogous to the hymn in its treatment of a sudden and transient phase of the life of spiritual feeling.

These and others I pass by-though one sees how largely they entered the work of the poets on Manbecause theology of any kind would not be likely to intrude into them.

I remain close then to the large lines I have spoken

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