A French Lover of Nature [pp. 780-787]

1885.] A F~~~cii LOVER OF NATLrkE. 781
us with a felicity so perfect that the result is son~ething like a
revelation?
What a scene that is which he sketches for us in those four
lines of the "Morte d'Arthur" beginning, " A broken chancel
with a broken cross; and the garden "not wholly in the busy
world, nor quite beyond it"; and "the light of London flaring
like a dreary dawn" before the traveller pacing along "the
dusky highway"; or the closing lines of that exquisite poem,
"Love and Duty," which are like nothing but an echo of" Lycidas." It is needless, and would be impertinent, to multiply instances; every one can recall a score of such pictures for himself; but only those who are thoroughly intimate and at home
with nature can enter into the accurate perfection of some of
Tennyson's touches, or understand the delight it is to find such
an interpreter of nature in every mood and season. How we feel
the keen sharpness of the autumn air, and how the tender beauty
of the autumn landscape rises before us as he tells of "the dews
that drench the furze," of the "silvery gossamers that twinkle
into green and gold"; and how our sense of the autumn stillness is deepened when we are reminded that it is only broken by
"the chestnut pattering to the ground "! He does not discourse
in a general way of the richness of autumnal tints, but brings the
season before us, "laying here- and there a fiery finger on the
leaves," and marks how the "beeches gather brown" while the
maple "burns itself away." And when the year is further advanced, with what a masterly touch he paints a stormy November morning-" the last red leaf whirled away," "the rooks
blown about the skies"; and how, "wildly dashed on tower and
tree, the sunbeam strikes along the world"! Can anything be
more true or picturesque than this picture of the sudden bursts
of sunlight on a wild morning in late autumn through the torn
rifts of the racing clouds, unless it is the description of the early
hours of a dusky summer night, when "the white kine glimmer~
ed, and the trees laid their dark arms about the field "? March
is the month "when rosy plumelets tuft the larch," and April
brings "deep tulips dashed with fiery dew; laburnums, dropping-wells of fire." He loves trees as those most gracious things
in nature deserve to be loved, and draws their distinctive features with an artist's hand because he notes them with a lover's eye: the "milky cones" of the horse-chestnut, the cedar's
"dark-green layers of shade," "the lime, a summer home of
murmurous wings," "the poplars ~with their noise of falling
showers," "the dry-tongued laurel's patteflng talk~'