velle Heloise" and developed by his
numerous followers in early nineteenth-century romance. The writers
who advocated a "return to nature" spelled nature with a capital N and
considered it usually as an anthropomorphic presence. As a result of
this, when they developed a natural background for their stories, they
established a sympathetic interchange of mood between the characters
and the landscape, and imagined (to use the famous phrase of Leibnitz)
a "pre-established harmony" between the shifting moods of nature and
of man. Thus the setting was employed no longer merely to subserve the
needs of action or to give a greater vividness of visual appeal, but
was used rather to symbolize and represent the human emotions evoked
in the characters at significant moments of the plot. When the hero
was suffering with sadness, the sky was hung with heavy clouds; and
when his mind grew illumined with a glimmering of hope, the sun broke
through a cloud-rift, casting light over the land.

Dickens is especially fond of imagining an emotional harmony between
his settings and his incidents. Consider for a moment the following
well-known passage from the funeral of Little Nell ("The Old Curiosity
Shop," Chapter LXXII):--

"Along the crowded path they bore her now; pure as the newly-fallen
snow that covered it; whose day on earth had been as fleeting. Under
the porch, where she had sat when Heaven in its mercy brought her to
that peaceful spot, she passed again; and the old church received her
in its quiet shade.

"They carried her to one old nook, where she had many and many a time
sat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement. The light
streamed on it through the colored window--a window where the boughs
of trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sang
sweetly all day long. With every breath of air that stirred among
those branches in the sunshine, some trembling, changing light would
fall upon her grave....

"They saw the vault covered, and the stone fixed down. Then, when
the dusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred
stillness of the place--when the bright moon poured in her light on
tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it
seemed to them) upon her quiet grave--in that calm time, when outward
things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and
worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them--then,
with tranquil and submissi