The Birds their quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal _Pan_
Knit with the _Graces_ and the _Hours_ in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring.
Here is all the variety of hill and valley, wood and lawn, rock and
meadow, waterfall and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape artists
also loved to depict, and which, together with ruined temples and
castles, unknown in Paradise, became the cherished ideal of landscape
gardening. By the influence of _Paradise Lost_ upon the gardeners, no
less than by the influence of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ upon the
poets, Milton may claim to be regarded as one of the forefathers of the
Romantic Revival. There is no need to distinguish carefully between
poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A
great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of
pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of
pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for
story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires
that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a
romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are
portrayed? And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been
taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes,
among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset,
cast on gleaming lakes.
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