orth while to
add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come
to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance.
Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of
nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says

If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a meter none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore.
[Footnote: _Preludes_.]

The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however,
was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not
intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature

More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist.
Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote:
See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too,
were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting
nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's
life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See
_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The
Prelude_.]

Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him
to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to
the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic
solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run
its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges
the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar
Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and
preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from
civilization:

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings.

No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality.
Stephen Phillips says of Emily Bronte's poetic gift,

Only barren hills
Could wring the woman riches out of thee,
[Footnote: _Emi