"My Ariel,—chick,—
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!"
In Wordsworth's mind nature is so absolute that her skies and mountains are just as plainly imaged as in the sheen of Derwentwater; and thence they passed into his verse. He wanders,—
"lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills."
He says of Milton:—
"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart."
A primeval sorrow, a cosmic pain, is in the expression of his dead love's reunion with the elements:—
"No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees."
The souls of the Hebrew bards, inheritors of pastoral memories, ever consorted with the elements, invoking the "heavens of heavens," "the waters that be above the heavens," "fire and hail; snow, and vapor: stormy wind fulfilling His word." Of the Greeks, Æschylus is more elemental than Pindar, even than Homer. Among our moderns, a kindred quality strengthened the imaginations of Byron and Shelley; Swinburne too, whom at his best the Hebraic feeling and the Grecian sway by turns, is most self-forgetful and exalted when giving it full play.
