Of course Shakspeare's
omniscience included all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or
small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the
daily atmosphere. Coming to our own times, one must quarrel with Ruskin
as taking rather the artist's view of Nature, selecting the available
bits and dealing rather patronizingly with the whole; and one is tempted
to charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not
being of a temperament quite liquid and musical enough to admit the full
vibration of the great harmonics. The three human foster-children who
have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,--an odd triad,
surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select,--are Wordsworth,
Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual
preference too far, to say, that there seems almost a generic difference
between these three and any others,--however wide be the specific
differences among themselves,--to say that, after all, they in their
several paths have attained to an habitual intimacy with Nature, and the
rest have not?
Yet what wonderful achievements have some of the fragmentary artists
performed! Some of Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost
as much study as the landscape.
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