Note 367 — Chapter II · INDICATIONS OF A NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE IN THE POETRY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (continued 2)
Reading edition
See “Night Thoughts,” vi, where there is an interesting statement of the theory afterward expounded in Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection.” Compare Young’s,
Objects are but th’ occasion; ours th’ exploit; Ours is the cloth, the pencil, and the paint, Which nature’s admirable picture draws (“Night,” vi, 431),
with Coleridge’s,
O Lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does nature live; Ours is her wedding garment; ours her shroud.
In the same passage by Young is the line concerning the power of our senses that
Half create the wondrous world they see,
from which Wordsworth took a line in “Tintern Abbey.” In Satire I, 249 there are some lines that sound absurdly like certain stanzas in “Peter Bell”:
On every thorn delightful wisdom grows; In every rill a sweet instruction flows. But some, untaught, o’erhear the whispering rill, In spite of sacred leisure, blockheads still.
The lines
In distant wilds, by human eyes unseen, She rears her flowers, and spreads her velvet green; Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace And waste their music on the savage race (Satire V, 229),
come between the similar passages by Gay and Gray.
Cf. also the simile of the eagle and the serpent (“Vanquished Love,” Book II, 226), with Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam,” i, sts. 8–10.