my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with
life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and
sympathy in them; for instance:

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the river with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion....
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another...
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea.

and:

I love all thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight;
The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night,
Autumn evening and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves and winds and storms--
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love,
sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but
both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain
perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a
bitter ingredient in their poetry.

Let us now turn to France.

LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO

Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre
portrayed it poetically, not only in _Paul and Virginia_, but in
_Chaumiere Indienne_ and _Etudes de la Nature_. The science which
these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he
had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination: he
lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the
mind and the phenomena of the outer world. Chateaubriand, on the
contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent. It is true that
his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but
his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling. He had Rousseau's
melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those 'oppressive
masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic
about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and
the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His Rene, that life-like
figure, half-passionate, half-_blase_, measuring everything by
himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed
a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[15] 'It was
not God whom I contemplated on th