POETRY AND THE LOVE OF NATURE.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 79, 18 September 1878, Page 3

POETRY AND THE LOVE OF NATURE.

Poetry not only enables us to appreciate what we have already experienced, but it puts in the way of getting new experiences. This was Wordsworth’s especial claim for poetry, that it widened our sympathies widened them in some new' direction—that it was ever giving us, in fact, not new quotations, hut new culture. Consider the wonderful social effect of even so partial a thing as the culture that Wordsworth himself gave us. Consider the effect of it on a common worldly woman —let her be girl or matron —who, without it would he nothing hut a half mechanical creature, living, as far as her interests went, a wretched hand-to-mouth existence of thin distraction, or eager, anxiou«, scheming for herself or her daughters. Cultivate her just in tin’s one direction —give her but this one fragment of culture, a love of nature —and all the mean landscape of her mind will be lit up with a sudden beauty, as the beam of ideal sunshine breaks across it, with its “ light that never tvas on sea or land.” I don’t say that such a woman will become better for this, but she will become more interesting. In a girl, however pretty, w hat is there to interest a man if he reads nothing in her face from night to night hut that she is getting daily more worn and jaded in the search for a rich husband ? Or even to go a step higher, in the unthinking, uncultivated flirt, so common in every class of society, what is there in her that a man will not soon discover to he insipid or wearying ? But give her one genuine, disinterested taste, and all is changed. If I had an audience about me of 3'oung ladies, whom it was not too late to advise, I would say to them : Try to win for yourselves one taste of a deep, true sort. Study Wordsworth, and some parts of Shelley ; open out your sympathies by their aid, in just one direction. Learn to love the sea, the woods, and the wild flowers, with all their infinite changes of scent and colour, and sound the purple moor, the brown mountain stream, and the rolling mists. Let these things grow to “ haunt yon like a passion.” Learn in this way the art of desiring more in this world than any understand. You’ll perhaps find it a little dull at first, but go on, and don’t he disheartened, and then—by-and-bye—-by-and-bye, go and look in the lookingglass, and study your own face. Hasn’t some new look, child, come into your eyes, and given them an expression a something that they wanted before ? Smile. Hasn’t your smile some strange meaning in it that it never used to have ? Yon are a little melancholy, perhaps, but no matter. The melancholy is worth the cost. — 1 The New Rebublic.’