“As hundred winds ’mid oaks of great mountains, As hundred torrents from lofty hills, As clouds in darkness rushing on, As the great ocean tumbling on the shore, So vast, so sounding, dark and stern, Met the fierce warriors on Lena. The shout of the host on the mountain height Was like thunder on a night of storms, When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens, And thousand spirits wildly shriek On the waste whirlwind of the hills.” And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by gleams of tender light— “Pleasing to me are the words of songs, Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone; Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild On the brake and knoll of roes, When slowly rises the sun On the silent flank of hoary Bens— The loch, unruffled, far away, Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.”[16] Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it. Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the minds that were still young when this century opened, and added each a fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision into the life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they had never done before, and to love her with a new passion. But original as this impulse in the present century has been, we must not forget how much it owed, both in itself and in its manifold forms of expression, to the poetry of Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that poetry there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these the popular one was probably the most powerful in moulding the Poetry that was about to be. CHAPTER XIV. WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF NATURE.