Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.

Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage in
the second _Georgic_ to which I have referred is in its essence more
modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity involved a
divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the nature within.
With the rise of the modern spirit delight in the external world
returns; and from Chaucer downwards through the whole course of
English poetry are scattered indications of a mood which draws from
visible things an intuition of things not seen. When Wither, in
words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, says of his muse,--

By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,--
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man,--

he felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere
collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some
sense of her mysterious whole.

Passages like this, however, must not he too closely pressed. The
mystic element in English literature has run for the most part into
other channels; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and