German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way
of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the
stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning
walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be,
they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the
work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor
Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem
in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of
moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe
could give to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who
will read his Wanderer,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a
peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a
temple near Cuma,--may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe
does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek
power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his:-
What little town, by river or seashore -
to his:-
White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves -
or his:-
. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn -
in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I
quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and
unmistakeable power.
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