From Wordsworth to Hopkins, from Beethoven to Vaughan Williams, from Constable to Cézanne, the image of nature returns with its promise of a more than worldly consolation.
And invariably it is associated with membership in its vanished or vanishing forms: the pious routines and rites of passage of a folk culture at peace with itself
From the very beginning of the Romantic ever, consciousness stands apart from the natural world. The Romantic artist is a wanderer. The old moral order that lies en folded in nature has withdrawn from his grasp. Goethe's Faust typifies this stance, and nothing is more prophetic of the course of modern culture than Faust's relation to Gretchen, the nno en C dise ther dre as S 268 ther abo riag nity