SOURCE: “The Poetry,” in The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin, Princeton University Press, 1936, pp. 93-147.

[In the following essay, Logan discusses at length Darwin's poetic merits, considering first the poet's occasional verse and continuing on through Darwin's three major works of poetry: The Loves of the Plants, The Economy of Vegetation, and the posthumously published Temple of Nature.]

We, therefore, pleas’d, extol thy song,
          Though various, yet complete,
Rich in embellishment, as strong,
          And learn’d as it is sweet.

William Cowper: TO DR DARWIN

Let these, or such as these, with just applause,
Restore the muse’s violated laws;
But not in flimsy Darwin’s pompous chime,
That mighty master of unmeaning rhyme,
Whose gilded cymbals, more adorn’d than clear,
The eye delighted, but fatigued the ear;
In show the simple lyre could once surpass
But now, worn down, appear in native brass;
While all his train of hovering sylphs around
Evaporate in similes and sound:
Him let them shun, with him let tinsel die:
False glare attracts, but more offends the eye.

Lord Byron: english bards and scotch reviewers

There must have been a murmur of surprise, even in the House of Fame, when that capricious lady sentenced Erasmus Darwin to disgrace and oblivion. It was a cruel judgment on one whom Horace Walpole had admired so extravagantly; on one of whom Anna Seward had said, ‘he is surely not inferior to Ovid; and if poetic taste is not much degenerated, or shall not hereafter degenerate, The Botanic Garden will live as long as the Metamorphoses;¹ on one who was regarded by The English Review as among the choicest of poets.

But if a man ever paid penance for his literary crimes, Darwin has. The reviews turned against him, he was cruelly parodied, Wordsworth and Coleridge shuddered over him, and Byron mocked. Modern scholars and critics, when they have mentioned him at all, have for the most part continued the abuse. It has become the fashion to dismiss him with flippancy. He had received absurd praise in his lifetime, and doubtless he became a little swollen with conceit. When such a man is dead and buried, when his fame has crumbled to dust, it is good sport to trample even the dust and to call him ‘a pompous, dabbling, self-satisfied, yet most attractive ass.’²

The wheel has come full circle. It is time that Darwin's poetry should receive impartial judgment, for it deserves the fair consideration not only of the scholar but also of the few who find amusement in the odd byways of literature. In attempting such a criticism the author is not flattered with the hope held out by Edgeworth that ‘in future times some critic will arise who shall re-discover The Botanic Garden and build his fame upon this discovery. … It will shine out again the admiration of posterity.’³ Neither the present writer nor Dr. Darwin need expect so rich a benison. Darwin's poetry is dead eternally for the general reader. But to the student of literature it is interesting both for its own sake and also because it commanded the attention of a vast public during the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was, moreover, familiar—although for the most part despised—to the galaxy of great poets who lived during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As such, its literary orientation and its artistic evaluation seem not unimportant.

I. OCCASIONAL POETRY

As has been pointed out in Chapter One [of The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin],⁴ Darwin's verses on “The Death of Prince Frederick” is the earliest poem that we know anything about. Few would dispute the reviewer in The European Magazine for February, 1795, when he says: ‘His Poem on that occasion, had it stood unsupported by his later productions, would have hardly been distinguished from the rest of his coadjutors.’ Very grand must such lines as these have sounded to the young Darwin:

Ye meads enamell'd, and ye waving woods,
With dismal yews and solemn cypress mourn,
Ye rising mountains, and ensilver'd floods,
Repeat my sighs, and weep upon his urn.
Oft in your haunts the young Marcellus stray'd,
There oft in thought your future glories plann'd,
Bade sacred Science lift her laurell'd head,
And Peace extend her olive o'er the land.

To the ‘young Marcellus’ he gives immortality, but in the courts of Jove, not in a Christian heaven. From this eminence—

He still on Albion's realms may deign to smile
And shed the sunshine on her blissful isle,
With hand unseen some hidden thread direct,
Still point the haven, and the helm protect.

The piece is bombastic and the technique uneven, but the inclusion of the poem in the Cambridge collection goes to show that Darwin's interests were not entirely scientific. It is difficult to imagine the young Charles Darwin trying his hand at a poem. One feels that Erasmus may have taken his ‘art’ more seriously in this boyish exercise than in the later years when his poetic reputation was high.

Versifying continued to hold its attractions for him after the Cambridge days had passed. Settled in Lichfield as a physician, he took pleasure in instructing young Anna Seward, schooling the Swan in her first uncertain notes. As a matter of fact her verses were so remarkably smooth that the Doctor suspected them to be a copy of the poetry of Canon Seward, her father. When the Canon was away in Derby, Darwin wrote out a first stanza and challenged the girl to finish the poem. He wrote:

To mark how fair the primrose blows,
How soft the feather'd muses sing,
My wandering steps had pressed the dews,
My soul enraptur'd hail'd the spring.

Perhaps it was a bad beginning, but Miss Seward completed the poem in seven very fluent stanzas, artfully punishing her mentor by ending up with praise of Milton whom no Caprice, ‘A squalid, sickly tasteless dame’, could prevent her from enjoying. Darwin had made fun of her extravagant love of Paradise Lost. This convinced the Doctor of Nancy's talent, and he was indiscreet enough bluntly to tell Canon Seward that his daughter's verses were better than any the Canon could write.⁵

But what poetry was the Doctor writing all this time? We will permit Anna Seward to explain the situation.

To those many rich presents, which Nature bestowed on the mind of Dr. Darwin, she added the seducing, and often dangerous gift of a highly poetic imagination; but he remembered how fatal that gift professionally became to the young physicians, Akenside and Armstrong. Concerning them, the public could not be persuaded, that so much excellence in an ornamental science was compatible with intense application to a severer study. … Thus, through the first twenty-three years of his practice as a physician, Dr. Darwin, with the wisdom of Ulysses, bound himself to the medical mast, that he might not follow those delusive syrens, the muses, or be considered as their avowed votary. Occasional little pieces, however, stole at seldom occurring periods from his pen; though he cautiously precluded their passing the press, before his latent genius for poetry became unveiled to the public eye in its copious and dazzling splendour. Most of these minute gems have stolen into newspapers and magazines, since the impregnable rock, on which his medical and philosophical reputation were placed, induced him to contend for that species of fame, which should entwine the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Pharmacy.⁶

This inimitable quotation (it is Nancy in her most Swan-like tones) needs to be supplemented by a statement of Darwin's in a letter to one Mr. Cradock, dated 1775, in which he points out that he had ‘neglected the muses’ for twenty years, but had lately taken up the pen and written a poem to persuade a Derbyshire lady not to cut down a grove of trees.⁷

Miss Seward has preserved eleven of these ‘minute gems’ buried in her Memoirs. They include the four amorous poems written during the period when love for Mrs. Pole broke the bonds of our Ulysses, unsealed his ears, and caused him to fall a ready victim to the sirens. The last two of these love poems, the dream “Elegy” and the “Ode to the River Derwent”⁸ were printed in The European Magazine for August, 1802. All four were written in 1778, the year when Darwin first met Mrs. Pole.

The first of the series was written soon after the Doctor had cured Mrs. Pole's children and she had returned to her home at Radburn, in Derbyshire. It is a gay piece in which the Doctor gives instructions to his friend Matthew Boulton, of Birmingham, for a tea-vase designed as a present to Mrs. Pole. Rather precious, it is pretty in a brittle way. Darwin was a competent writer of light, occasional verse, and it is a pity that he did not exercise this talent more often. Of the four love poems this is the only one that is fit to read. The others are conventional and commonplace. Speaking of the vase he says:

I'll have no bending serpents kiss
The foaming wave, and seem to hiss;
No sprawling dragons gape with ire,
And snort out steam, and vomit fire;
No Naiads weep; no sphinxes stare;
No tail-hung dolphins swim in air.
Let leaves of myrtle round the rim,
With rose-buds twisting, shade the brim;
Perch'd on the rising lid above,
O place a lovelorn, turtle dove.
Vase, when Eliza deigns to pour,
With snowy hand, thy boiling shower;
And sweetly talks, and smiles, and sips
The fragrant steam, with ruby lips,
More charms thy polish'd orb shall shew
Than Titian's glowing pencil drew;
More than his chisel soft unfurl'd,
Whose heav'n-wrought statue charms the world.(9)

A poem written probably a year or so earlier than these is his “Elegy to Dr. Small,” who died in February, 1775. This poem was printed in 1791 in The European Magazine (vol. 19, p. 473). The concluding stanza strikingly anticipates the favorite mannerism of Darwin's later poetry, his custom of rendering abstractions sensuous through personification. Here we have:

Cold Contemplation leans her aching head,
And as on human woe her broad eye turns,
Waves her meek hand, and sighs for science dead,
For science, virtue, and for Small she mourns!(10)

This, together with a six line inscription called “Speech of a Water Nymph”¹¹ (ca. 1777), and the lost poem (1775) referred to in the letter to Mr. Cradock are the earliest poems that we know of after the Cambridge exercise. The five remaining poems that Miss Seward includes in her Memoirs are: “Address of a Water Nymph” (ca. 1779), written for Mr. Sneyd of Belmont; “Air:—spirituosi” (1780), a nonsense jingle of a love-sick tomcat; “On a Target at Drakelow” (1791), a dull poem, which had appeared in a Derby paper, on the skilful archery of one Miss Susan Sneyd; a poem “For the Monument of the Rev. W. Mason” of which Miss Seward remarks, ‘the verses are excellent, though, from being utterly without religious hope or trust, they are improper for a tombstone;’ and “On the Death of General Wolf.”

Having a sense of humor as well as a facile pen, Darwin often dashed off nonsense rimes. The “Air:—spirituosi,” written by his cat Snow to Miss Seward's pussy Po, indicates how very ‘amiable’ Darwin could be in spite of Anna's word to the contrary. It commences:

Cats I scorn, who, sleek and fat,
Shiver at a Norway rat;
Rough and hardy, bold and free
Be the cat that's made for me!

and closes with the Chorus:

Qu-ow wow, quall, wawl, moon.

He often, on the spur of the moment, wrote jingles for his children.

My dear Miss Sue,
Of lovely hue,
No sugar can be sweeter;
You do as far,
Excell sugar,
As sugar does salt petre.(12)

is an example of his fun. Or better:

Simon did vow, nay he did swear
He'd dance with none but who were fair,
Suppose we women should dispense
Our hands to none but men of sense
Suppose! Well, Madam, and what then?
Why, sir, you'd never dance again.(13)

He has even parodied Pope, somewhat at the expense of his own profession.

Doctors themselves must die, like those they kill,
Sunk the quick pulse, the brazen [?] Pestil still,
E'n he whose hand the potion'd cup extends
Shall shortly want the cordial draught he sends,
Then from his opening hand the Fee shall part,
And the last pang shall tear it from his heart,
His idle Business at one gasp be o'er,
The Bill forgot and Patients drench'd no more.(14)

This vein of humor, ranging from the sheer nonsense of the jingles to the half-serious parody of Pope, reveals an aspect of Darwin's poetry hitherto little considered. More significant than they appear intrinsically, these poems are the direct precursors of his Loves of the Plants, the culmination of Darwin's humor. As we shall presently see, this poem is not in the least serious, and it was grossly to misjudge Darwin to parody it as a pompous piece. It is the fine flowering of Darwin's bent to write light and humorous verse.

A poem called “Address to the Swilcar Oak” has a curious history. It appears at the end of Section XVIII (p. 480) of Phytologia with this introduction:

The following address to Swilcar oak in Needwood forest, a very tall tree, which measures thirteen yards round at its base, and eleven yards round at four feet from the ground, and is believed to be six hundred years old, was written at the end of Mr. Mundy's poem on leaving that forest, and may amuse the weary reader, and conclude this Section.

This poem also appeared in March, 1800, in The European Magazine (p. 226), the same year in which Phytologia was published.

A reviewer in The Quarterly Review, October, 1873 (pp. 431-432) quotes the poem, with a few alterations and the omission of an eight-line stanza, as an address by Rogers to a tree at Holland House, ‘now published for the first time.’ Omissions and alterations are made, cleverly enough, where there is a direct reference to Mundy and where the Swilcar oak is referred to by name.

Francis Galton, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, discovered this strange case of piracy and commented on it in an article published in Notes and Queries, February 13, 1875 (pp. 122-124). He had at hand a copy of Mundy's Needwood Forest, perhaps printed about 1808, and apparently circulated only among Mundy's friends. The poem, however, is said to have been written in 1776. Galton then quotes the “Swilcar Oak” poem as it appeared in Needwood Forest, which is signed ‘E. D.’ and underneath which is written ‘Dr. Darwin.’ This is an earlier version of the verses that later appeared in Phytologia and in The European Magazine. Galton, who was unaware that the poem had appeared in the latter publication, is surprised that Rogers should have ‘purloined the verses from Phytologia and passed them off for his own.’ More probably he stole them from The European Magazine.

It is an amusing and clever piece of plagiarism. It is the only instance that I know of where the Darwin treasure chest has been pilfered. And by drawing forth Galton's publication of the earlier version we are able to form some conclusions as to the evolution of a Darwin poem. Only one other poem, “Inscription for the Monument of Dr. Small,” exists in more than one form and allows comparison.

The second version of “The Swilcar Oak” is smoother than the first, more musical, but where there has been gain there has also been some loss. In achieving greater finish, Darwin has lost naturalness and vigor. For instance:

Say, when of old the snow-hair'd druids pray'd
With mad-ey'd rapture in your hallow'd shade,

has been altered to:

Erst, when the Druid-bards with silver hair
Pour'd round thy trunk the melody of prayer;

Again, the first form reads:

Should o'er thy brow the thunders harmless break,
And thy firm roots in vain the whirlwind shake,
Yet must thou fall.—Thy withering glories sunk,
And arm after arm shall leave the mould'ring trunk.

which has been polished in this way:

Should round thy brow innocuous lightning shoot,
And the fierce whirlwinds shake thy steadfast root;
Yet shalt thou fall!—thy leavy tresses fade,
And those bare shatter'd antlers strew the glade;
Arm after arm shall leave the mouldering bust,
And they firm fibres crumble into dust!

In his second version Darwin has gained more fluency and filled in his picture more completely, but at the expense of adding four new lines. The poem as it appeared in 1800 is perhaps a better poem than the one first written for Needwood Forest, but Darwin was not artist enough to advance in one respect without loss in another.

The second case of revision occurs in a short poem copied in the handwriting of Sir Francis Darwin in a blank page of Erasmus Darwin's Commonplace Book. I quote here in full:

Dr. Chorby of Doncaster (a Poet) says the verses upon Dr. Small's monument were written by Dr. Darwin—

While Time's strong arm[s?] with mighty Scythe erase
Earths cumbrous works and Empires from their base
Each transient hour its sickle fine employs
And crops the sweet buds of Domestic joys—
While Time's huge Scythe strikes Empires from their roots
Each transient moment wields its little sickle
And crops the sweet buds of domestic bliss.

This was written before the one above it.

The absurd lines quoted last are clearly a rough draught of the finished epitaph. It will be noted that these verses are not the poem which Anna Seward prints as Dr. Darwin's elegy on his dead friend, and which she says were engraved on a vase in Matthew Boulton's garden.¹⁵ Are they genuine? Since Sir Francis quotes Dr. Chorby (‘a Poet’) as his authority, he must not have found a copy of the poem, either signed by Darwin or in his autograph, among the family papers. But presumably he did have a copy of the first crude draught which bears so close a resemblance to the verses on the monument that there can be no doubt that they were written by the same hand.

We next take into brief consideration a poem which is not to be found among any of the family manuscripts at Down House, and as far as I am able to learn, appeared in print for the first time in 1812. Its source has not been discovered. Thus its authenticity is exceedingly doubtful. It was published in an obscure volume entitled: Poetical Selections Consisting of The Most Approved Pieces of our Best Modern British Poets Excellent Specimens of Fugitive Poetry and some Original Pieces By Cowper, Darwin, and others that have never before been published. 1812. The one poem by Darwin (p. 236) is called “Remembrance,” and the first two stanzas read:

When the soft tear steals silently down from the eye,
Take no note of its course, nor detect the low sigh;
From some spring of soft sorrow its origin flows,
Some tender remembrance that weeps as it goes.
Ah! tis not to say what will bring to the mind
The joys that are fled, and the friends left behind;
A tune, or a song, or the time of the year,
Strikes the key of reflection and moans on the ear.

There follow two more stanzas in like style. In addition to its dubious appearance in this collection, it will be observed at once that neither the manner nor the sentiment of the poem is Darwinian. The poem is entirely without that appeal to the eye, those bold sensuous figures, that is so much the essence of Darwin's style, and which, even at its worst, gives it a masculine vigor. Certainly the maudlin tone of “Remembrance” would have been detestable to Erasmus Darwin. He despised ‘soft sorrow’, and one glance at his portraits makes it extremely difficult to associate with that scornful and intellectual face ‘tender remembrance that weeps as it goes.’ He was a Stoic whose deeper feelings—not love and wrath, but the more subjective emotions—were held sternly in check, and he could not endure poetizing them in a gush of tears.

There is little doubt in the mind of the present writer that the poem is spurious. Very interesting, however, is the fact that as late at 1812 there survived a spark of Darwin's sometime glory, enough at least to convince an editor that his name on the title-page would attract buyers.

The last poems that we shall examine here are two of a religious nature that are, perhaps, the most interesting of the short pieces since they shed a new light on the character of Darwin. Because of their peculiar interest they deserve quotation in full.

‘HYMN ON PROSPERITY’

                                                                                By D. D.
Prosperity and adversity—Life and Death
Poverty and Riches come of the Lord.

Ecc. II. v. 14 [sic.]

The Lord! how tender is his love
His justice how august!
Hence, all her fears my soul derives
There, anchors all her trust.
He showers the manna from above
To feed the barren waste,
Or points with Death the fiery Hail
And Famine waits the Blast—
Crowns, Realms and worlds, his wrath incens'd
Are dust beneath his tread
He blights the Fair, unplumes the Proud
And shakes the learned head.—
He bids distress forget to groan
The sick from anguish cease
Indulgent(16) spreads his healing wing
And softly whispers Peace.—
His vengence rides the rushing wind
Or tips the bolt with flame
His goodness breathes in every breeze
And warms in every beam.—(17)

The second of these poems is:

‘THE FOLLY OF ATHEISM’

                                        An Ode by Dr. Darwin
‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’
Dull atheist! Could a giddy dance
Of atoms lawless hurl'd
Construct so wonderful, so wise,
So harmonized a world?
Why do not Arabs driving sands
The sport of every storm
Fair freighted Fleets, the child of chance
Or gorgeous temples form?(18)
Presumptuous wretch, thyself survey,
That lesser fabric scan,
Tell me from whence th' immortal dust
The god! the Reptile! Man.
Where wast thou when this teeming earth
From chaos burst its way?
When stars exulting sang the morn,
And hail'd the new born day?
What! when the embryo speck of life
The miniature of Man
Nurs'd in the womb its slender form
To stretch and swell began.
Say didst thou warp the fibre woof
Or mould the sentient brain?
Thy fingers sketch the living nerve
Or fill the purple vein?
Didst thou then bid the bounding heart
Its endless toil begin?
And clothe in flesh the hardening bone?
And weave the silken skin?
Who bids the babe to catch the breeze?
Expand its panting breast,
And with impatient hands untaught,
The milky rill arrest?
Or who, with unextinguish'd love,
The mother's bosom warms
Along the rugged paths of life
To bear it in her arms?
A God! a God! the wide earth shouts,
A God! the Heavens reply,
He moulded in his palm the world,
And hung it in the sky.
‘Let us make man,’ with beauty clad,
And health in every vein,
And reason thron'd upon his brow,
Stepped forth majestic man!—
Around he turns his wondering eyes,
All nature's works surveys,
Admires the earth, the sky, himself,
And tries his tongue in praise.
Ye hills and vales, ye meads and woods,
Bright sun and glittering stars,
Fair creatures, tell me if ye can,
From whence and what I am?
What parent powers all great and good,
Do these around me own?
Tell me, creation, tell me how
T' adore the vast unknown.—(19)

Before we can comment on the obvious significance of these poems, we must examine their authenticity. In 1873 Emma Galton received a letter from James Martineau, which she copied out and sent to Reginald Darwin. Her letter is preserved among the family papers at Down House. In this letter we learn that Martineau was compiling a collection of hymns, and in his research had found the “Hymn on Prosperity” in Hymns and Psalms (p. 261), published first in 1795 by Kippis, Rees, Jervis, and Morgan, joint editors. Before including the poem as a hymn in his own collection, Martineau needed assurance of its authenticity.

Through my friend Mr. Hensleigh of Wedgwood [he writes], I learn that Mr. Charles Darwin and William Erasmus Darwin know nothing by tradition or record of such a production; and think it most unlikely ‘to have come from the head of their grandfather.’ The internal evidence would at once bring me to the same conclusion, were it not for a certain ring in the 3rd and 5th stanza, which remind me of the Doctor's verse. As far as external evidence goes … a negative presumption in favour of the alleged origin arises from the fact that while Kippis and Reese, who moved not far from the Doctor's social and literary orbit, published the hymn as his, in a book of vast circulation many years before his death, the authorship was never subsequently contradicted or questioned so far as can be ascertained. Yet new editions of the book containing it appeared with great rapidity, affording constantly renewed opportunities of correction.

The reply that James Martineau received to his enquiry is not preserved, but it must have satisfied him that the poem was genuine, for it appears in his Hymns of Praise and Prayer, published in 1876, with many subsequent editions. Charles Darwin must at one time have seen the poem and then forgotten it, as it was copied into the Commonplace Book by Sir Francis Darwin, the son of Erasmus, who died in 1850. Although Erasmus Darwin has never been credited with much piety, the fact that the “Hymn on Prosperity” appeared in a popular hymnal during his life, that it was transcribed into the Commonplace Book, and that Martineau appears to have been satisfactorily answered either by Emma Galton or by Reginald Darwin, seems adequate evidence of its authenticity.

There exists among the family papers at Down House a copy of “The Folly of Atheism,” written on paper bearing the date 1799 in the watermark, but not in the autograph of Erasmus Darwin. It appears also in the Commonplace Book, pp. 167, 173-174 (pp. 168-171 were torn out at an earlier date), in ‘the handwriting of Lady Darwin.’ There exist a few minor variants in the two copies. It is perhaps safe to assume that the transcript by Lady Darwin is a later one, and that the other must date not much later than 1799 and was possibly made by one of Erasmus Darwin's children.

Charles Darwin (Life, p. 44) says that the poem was published, but where I am unaware. But who could doubt that it was a genuine poem of Darwin? The giddy dance of atoms constructing an harmonized world, the ‘teeming earth’ bursting its way from chaos, the ‘embryo speck of life’, the ‘sentient brain’, the fingers, heart, skin, the babe taking its first breath—these are the matters of Zoonomia, of The Temple of Nature, but regarded with religious wonder.

Yet Coleridge called Darwin a materialist and regarded him as an atheist. Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, even Anna Seward, considered him a scoffer at holy things. Yet we find him represented in two exceedingly popular hymnals, and writing:

A God! a God! the wide earth shouts,
A God! the Heavens reply.

Indeed, one need not rely on these poems only for evidence of Darwin's religion. In Zoonomia we find him saying:

[I am ready] to believe with St. Paul and Malbranch, that the ultimate cause of all motion is immaterial, that is God. St. Paul says, ‘in him we live and move, and have our being’; and in the 15th chapter of Corinthians, distinguishes between the psyche or living spirit, and the pneuma or reviving spirit.²⁰

Again, in a significant note in The Temple of Nature, in which Darwin has pointed out the possibility that mankind were once quadrupeds, he concludes thus:

Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to the dignity of the Creator of all things.²¹

In discussing reproduction in one of the ‘Additional Notes’ appended to the same poem, we find him saying, rather cautiously:

But it may appear too bold in the present state of our knowledge on this subject, to suppose that all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality; and that they have, by innumerable reproductions, during innumerable centuries of time, gradually acquired the size, strength, and excellence of form and faculties which they now possess; and that such amazing powers were originally impressed on matter and spirit by the great Parent of Parents, Cause of Causes, Ens Entium!²²

This evidence of design in nature he points out again and again. Speaking of the cycles in nature, he says:

Thus all the suns, and the planets which circle around them, may again sink into one central chaos; and may again, by explosions, produce a new world; which, in process of time, may resemble the present one, and at length again undergo the same catastrophe! these great events may be the result of the immutable laws impressed on matter by the Great Cause of Causes, Parent of Parents, Ens Entium!²³

Finally, in a note on the lines, ‘From wandering atoms, ethers, airs, and gas, By combination form the organic mass!’, from The Temple of Nature, Darwin in so many words denies atheism:

Had those ancient philosophers who contended that the world was formed from atoms ascribed their combinations to certain immutable properties received from the hand of the Creator, such as general gravitation, chemical affinity, or animal appetency, instead of ascribing them to blind chance; the doctrine of atoms, as constituting or composing the material world by the variety of their combinations, so far from leading the mind to atheism, would strengthen the demonstration of the existence of a Deity, as the first cause of all things; because the analogy resulting from our perpetual experience of cause and effect would have thus been exemplified through universal nature.²⁴

Certainly it should surprise no one that Darwin wrote a poem on “The Folly of Atheism.”

Darwin may not have been an orthodox Church of England man, but he believed in God. At the least he was a deist, and in spite of Coleridge's horror-stricken remark, there was in his heart a good deal of ‘such stuff as religion.’ Knowing him as he really was, we may read in a new light these opening lines of The Temple of Nature:

By firm immutable immortal laws,
Impress'd on Nature by the Great First Cause,
Say Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy, with potent charm,
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Immortal Love! who ere the morn of Time,
On wings outstretch'd, o'er Chaos hung sublime;
Warm'd into life the bursting egg of Night,
And gave young Nature to admiring Light!

There are numerous other short poems among the family papers at Down House. Some have been copied into the blank pages of the Commonplace Book by the children and grandchildren of Dr. Darwin, others are transcriptions among miscellaneous family records. Only one is in Darwin's own autograph. One or two are copied from the flyleaves of Dr. Darwin's books. This corpus of occasional poetry shows that Darwin had turned his hand many times to verse before he astonished his friends and the cultivated public with the publication of The Botanic Garden. Though the short pieces may merit little distinction as poetry, they form an appreciable supplement to his three long poems, and as such add their support to the justice of giving Erasmus Darwin his due consideration as a minor poet of the eighteenth century.²⁵

II. COMPOSITION OF THE BOTANIC GARDEN AND THE TEMPLE OF NATURE

However much Darwin may have been diverted by the composition of short poems from time to time, few seem to have thought of him seriously as a poet, and when he at last took up the professional pen we can imagine the surge of surprise that must have swept over his friends. One wonders if Darwin had long and secretly entertained ambitions to combine his scientific knowledge with his bent for making verses and compose a poem pretentious in length and matter. It would seem otherwise from Anna Seward's account of the inception of The Loves of the Plants which throws over the task the appearance of a casual undertaking. She writes in the Memoirs:

About the year 1777, Dr. Darwin purchased a little, wild, umbrageous valley, a mile from Lichfield, amongst the only rocks which neighbour that city so nearly. It was irriguous from various springs, and swampy from their plentitude. A mossy fountain, of the purest and coldest water imaginable, had, near a century back, induced the inhabitants of Lichfield to build a cold bath in the bosom of the vale. …

In some parts he widened the brook into small lakes, that mirrored the valley; in others, he taught it to wind between shrubby margins. Not only with trees of various growth did he adorn the borders of the fountain, the brook, and the lakes, but with various classes of plants, uniting the Linnean science with the charm of the landscape. …

Dr. Darwin restrained his friend Miss Seward's steps to this her always favourite scene till it had assumed its new beauties from cultivation. He purposed accompanying her on her first visit to his botanic garden, but a medical summons into the country deprived her of that pleasure. She took her tablets and pencil, and, seated on a flower-bank, in the midst of that luxuriant retreat, wrote the following lines, while the sun was gilding the glen, and while birds, of every plume, poured their song from the boughs.

[Here she inserts her poem, which presently we shall see Darwin stole.]

When Miss Seward gave this little poem to Dr. Darwin, he seemed pleased with it, and said, ‘I shall send it to the periodical publications; but it ought to form the exordium of a great work. The Linnean System is unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants, and trees. You should make flowers, plants, and trees, into men and women. I,’ continued he, ‘will write the notes, which must be scientific; and you shall write the verse.’

Miss Seward observed, that, besides her want of botanic knowledge, the plan was not strictly proper for a female pen; that she felt how eminently it was adapted to the efflorescence of his own fancy.²⁶

After some objections raised by the Doctor in fear that his professional reputation might suffer, he was persuaded to attempt the task, ‘especially since the subject of the poetry, and still more the notes, would be connected with pathology.’

It is perhaps safe to say that Darwin embarked on the task for the glory of science more than with the notion of greatly enriching English poetry. Linnaeus is the genius of The Loves of the Plants, not Ovid. We may even go so far as to say that the poetry was written primarily with the purpose of introducing to the general reading public the very learned notes which in all three of his long poems are as voluminous as the text itself, and which would never have commanded the popular attention had they appeared alone and unadorned ‘by a slight festoon of ribbons.’ It is doubtful if Darwin dreamed of the extravagant praise which The Loves of the Plants was to receive from such connoisseurs of taste as Walpole, and that he may very well have had misgivings that the poem would succeed at all. But botany was then a fashionable subject, and Darwin was shrewd enough to perceive a possible welcome for an exposition of the latest developments in this science, couched in light and popular poetry. At the same time he could give himself over to the congenial task of composing the scholarly notes, which would lend authority—and to the fashionable reader delightful dignity—to the light and whimsical verse.

But it was more than ten years after the talk with Anna Seward before the poem appeared. Darwin had in the meantime enlarged his plan to include two poems, which should be entitled The Botanic Garden; the first part he would call The Economy of Vegetation, the second, The Loves of the Plants. The second part, the original aim, was completed first and appeared two years before its companion piece was given to the world. This was wise, as The Loves of the Plants is much lighter reading than Part I and appealed to the popular taste as The Economy of Vegetation certainly would not have, had it appeared first. Never did an author play his cards more shrewdly. Once he had become a fashionable poet, Darwin was ensured a ready sale for his heavier works.

The Loves of the Plants appeared in 1789 as Part II of The Botanic Garden, printed by J. Jackson, Lichfield, and sold by J. Johnson, St. Paul's Churchyard, London. A second edition appeared in 1790, and a third in 1791 together with the first edition of Part I. It took the fancy of the day; all that Darwin must have hoped for it, and probably a great deal more, came to pass. Here was a competent scientist explaining the sexual classification of plants of the famous Linnaeus, and all done in such charming and amusing verse that any lady might comprehend with ease—and not even blush. It is not too much to say that The Loves of the Plants is one of the most remarkable tours de force in English literature.

The Proem sets the light and skipping pace of the poem.

Gentle Reader!

Lo, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life!—if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my Inchanted Garden.

Whereas P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of Augustus Caesar, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here exhibited them before thee. Which thou may'st contemplate as diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady's dressing room, connected only by a slight festoon of ribbons. And which, though thou may'st not be acquainted with the originals, may amuse thee by the beauty of their persons, their graceful attitudes, or the brilliancy of their dress.

Farewell.

This graceful greeting to the reader probably did as much as anything else to attract buyers and unlock for Darwin the door of popularity.

The poem consists of 1936 lines, divided into Darwin's invariable four cantos, and ninety-six plants are included in the botanical show. The poem lacks design, for as Walpole pointed out:

It is still more unfortunate that there is not a symptom of plan in the whole poem. The lady-like flowers and their lovers enter in pairs or trios, … as often as the couples in Cassandra, and yet you are not a whit more interested about one heroine and her swain than about another.²⁷

Nor does Darwin confine himself to botany; his love for analogies, the outgrowth of his theory of visual poetry and of his desire to enliven the poem, often leads him far afield. This will be obvious from a glance at what he calls—not without humor—the ‘Catalogue of the Poetic Exhibition.’²⁸

Canto I opens with an address to the ‘hovering sylphs’ and ‘aerial quires’ and to various other appurtenances of nature. Then the Botanic Muse is invoked:

Botanic Muse! who in this latter age
Led by your airy hand the Swedish sage,
Bade his keen eye your secret haunts explore
On dewy dell, high wood, and winding shore;
Say on each leaf how tiny Graces dwell;
How laugh the Pleasures in a blossom's bell;
How insect Loves arise on cobweb wings,
Aim their light shafts, and point their little stings.(29)

This lightness and playfulness of tone is sustained throughout the canto. The plants are introduced, one after another, and the poet adheres strictly to botany.

In Canto II the goddess ‘tunes to wilder notes the warbling wire.’ As if tired of the subject, or fearful that the reader is, Darwin introduces extraneous matter. Led astray by the gales which blow the seeds of the ‘Carline Thistle’ on long aerial journeys, the botanic muse drifts into an account of the balloonist Montgolfier, ‘the intrepid Gaul’ who ‘Launch'd the vast concave of his buoyant ball.’ On the whole, Canto II does ‘strike a wilder note’ than Canto I, especially in the picture of the horrors of opium, arising from the introduction of the poppy into the poem, and from the account of plagues and fevers and dropsies which is connected with the description of medicinal herbs such as the Peruvian bark and digitalis. This canto closes with a digression on the prison reforms of Howard.

In Canto III the goddess ‘shakes with deeper tones the enchanted dell’. Here we have introduced the ‘nightshade’ and an account of the superstitions with which that plant is associated, particularly with witchcraft. Poisonous plants make their appearance such as the laurel (Darwin tells us that distilled water from laurel leaves is deadly), the ‘hyppomane’ with which Indians are said to have poisoned their arrows, and the ‘longiflora’ or lobelia, which ‘grows in the West Indies, and spreads such deleterious exhalations around it, that an oppression of the breast is felt on approaching it at many feet distance when placed in the corner of the room or hothouse.’ It is in this canto that the fabulous Upas tree is introduced which we have seen took the fancy of Coleridge.³⁰ Canto III is perhaps the most interesting of the four which compose Part II.

In the fourth canto

—The tuneful Goddess on the glowing sky
Fix'd in mute ecstacy her glistening eye;

whereupon she strikes sweeter tones on her lute, and the poem closes with more of the light playfulness of Canto I. Other plants with their sex life are exposed to the reader, other anecdotes make their appearance, none of which is especially worth pointing out. It strikes one as the dullest canto of all, perhaps because the tricks of Canto I have already been played out, or because the reader has grown weary of vegetable amours.

It might be a matter of wonder to the modern reader that The Loves of the Plants should have caused such a stir and brought immediate fame to its author. It aims to teach but a smattering of botany; as a matter of fact Darwin was probably content merely to arouse interest in the system of Linnaeus.³¹ In this Darwin was perhaps wise, as he did not wish to tire his readers. Yet to the modern reader the descriptions of the plants are for the most part wearisome, and he feels that his tedium is not rewarded by bringing him much information. The many digressions are intended to break the monotony as well as to illustrate by visual analogy the aspects of the plants. Here interest is evoked but at the expense of breaking what continuity the poem may possess. The very lightness of tone that was employed to popularize the subject is at times inane; the modern reader looks in vain for wit or bright fantasy. It is incredible to us to-day that this poem should have been a ‘best seller’.

Yet we must bear in mind first of all that the eighteenth century was prolific in didactic poems on raising hops, sugar cane, gardening, and every conceivable subject, and was ready to accept with open arms any addition to the already crowded list. Botany was a fashionable topic, and here was a poem cut to order on the subject. Moreover, The Loves of the Plants has distinct originality. The subject itself was brand new, indeed unconventional and a little naughty. Here was a nature poem on science, not on tilling the soil or raising fleece which are time-honored topics akin to the age-old pastorals. The Loves of the Plants was daringly modern. Finally, what might appear to us as affected and distastefully ornate language, was at the time genteel and in the mode. The very airiness of tone was sufficiently restrained to be enjoyed in the most commonplace of fashionable drawing rooms. And in this connection it must be admitted that the versification is impeccable in its fluency and ease.

These then are the reasons why The Loves of the Plants established Erasmus Darwin's reputation as a successful poet for the next ten years, and opened the way for his successful publication of the two long and heavier poems that followed.

Part I, The Economy of Vegetation, was published in 1791. The public had awaited it eagerly, and as Anna Seward shrewdly points out, those who had bought Part II would perforce buy Part I to complete the poem, whether they were able to enjoy it or not. Walpole wrote to Miss Berry: ‘we shall have Dr. Darwin's stupendous poem in a fortnight, of which you saw parts,’³² although he later professed not to admire Part I as much as Part II.³³

Lines 1-58 of Canto I are in part Anna Seward's, the ones she wrote in 1778 when she was seated on a flower-bank in Darwin's ‘little, wild, umbrageous valley’,³⁴ which Darwin had remarked ought to form ‘the exordium of a great work.’ Miss Seward quotes Darwin as saying that he would send these verses to the periodical publications, and she states that they were sent by him a few weeks after they were composed to The Gentleman's Magazine. Miss Ashmun in The Singing Swan³⁵ says they were probably sent by Mr. Stevens of Repton, though she offers no reason for altering Anna Seward's account of their transmission to the press. At any rate her lines on Darwin's garden at Lichfield appeared in a revamped version in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1783, under her name, whence they were copied in the Annual Register; they were then used by Darwin to open his Economy of Vegetation without any acknowledgment to Miss Seward whatsoever. That lady was displeased, as she certainly had a right to be. Edgeworth in a letter to Sir Walter Scott³⁶ speaks of his surprise that Darwin should have used Miss Seward's verses, and quotes him as excusing himself on the ground that it was a compliment to the lady, ‘though the verses were not of the same tenor as his own.’ Yet he offers no explanation of his failure to acknowledge them. The act is indefensible. Charles Darwin says that in some respects the case ‘looks more like highway robbery than simple plagiarism’,³⁷ and Miss Ashmun remarks laconically: ‘The rights of women to recognition for their personal achievements were somewhat misty to the gentlemen of the period.’³⁸

In the ‘Advertisement’ Darwin says: ‘In the … Economy of Vegetation, the physiology of plants is delivered; and the operation of the Elements, as far as they may be supposed to affect the growth of Vegetables’, a programme that he does not strictly adhere to, as he gives an account of the creation not only of the world but of the stars as well. The economy of vegetation, precisely speaking, is not dealt with until the latter half of the fourth, and last, canto.

The poem includes everything from the electric eel to the Apollo Belvedere. It might well be given the pretentious title which one Henry Baker (another poet of the century) confidently bestowed upon his own poem; he called it The Universe! In 2428 lines, Darwin bewilders his reader with the most recent theories of natural history. His ambition was colossal, enough to stagger the most doughty dweller on Parnassus, yet it must be granted that Darwin shouldered his weighty task with surprising strength. He has reduced his multifarious material to some semblance of order, and the reader is conscious of a certain degree of mastery of the subject. Moreover, there is ingenuity in this mad attempt to expound science in the couplets of Pope, and there is an appeal to the curiosity, even of the lay reader, in the subject itself that redeems the obscure and artificial verse from complete dullness.

After the goddess of botany has descended, the first canto centres on the activity of heat in the universe. Divine Love, or Eros, hatched by the warmth of spring, has burst from the great Egg of Night and by his arrows and torch pierces and vivifies all things.

Thus when the Egg of Night, on Chaos hurl'd,
Burst, and disclosed the cradle of the world;
First from the gaping shell refulgent sprung
Immortal Love, his bow celestial strung;—
O'er the wide waste his gaudy wings unfold,
Beam his soft smiles, and wave his curls of gold;—
With silver darts He pierced the kindling frame,
And lit with torch divine the ever-living flame.(39)

With the appearance of light, evoked by the command of God, chaos is replaced by cosmos:

‘—Let There Be Light!’ proclaimed the Almighty Lord,
Astonish'd Chaos heard the potent word;—
Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first;
Bend, as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.
—Onward they move amid their bright abode,
Space without bound, The Bosom of Their God!(40)

The goddess of botany then sings in couplets of shooting stars, lightning, the aurora borealis, fires at the earth's centre, animal incubation, volcanic mountains, calcined shells, glow-worms, fire-flies, steam-engines, water engines, and ‘flying-chariots’. Of the latter, she says:

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer'd Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.(41)

Nor is our own Dr. Franklin neglected by her botanic highness. In the section on electricity,⁴² she says:

You led your Franklin to your glazed retreats,
Your air-built castles, and your silken seats;
Bade his bold arm invade the lowering sky,
And seize the tiptoe lightnings, ere they fly;
O'er the young Sage your mystic mantle spread,
And wreath'd the crown electric round his head.(43)

After the introduction of much other miscellaneous matter, the canto closes with the departure of the Nymphs of fire ‘like sparks from artificial Fireworks.’

The second canto of this amazing poem treats of the earth which in good Rosicrucian manner is represented by the gnomes. This canto naturally introduces much geology, such as the formation of limestone, calcareous spar, and white marble. From this the mind of the botanic goddess wanders off to the subject of statuary, and she glows with enthusiastic admiration of ‘the celebrated Hercules of Glyco resting after his labours’, or of the Venus de Medici, or the Apollo Belvedere.

But there is no need of tracing further Darwin's flights from liberty in America to the production of tin, copper, zinc, lead, mercury, platinum, gold, and silver; or of crudely exposing his shift from Hannibal crossing the Alps to the subject of manures, which, in turn, leads to an account of St. Peter delivered from prison. The nature of this conglomerate poem is already obvious. It remains only to be said that Canto III deals with water and Canto IV with wind, although from Section X of the last canto to the end of the poem we get a good deal of actual ‘vegetable economy’. The whole poem is a storehouse of curiosities, and if read in conjunction with the notes, is not a dull performance. Although it is disjointed, if we consider the vastness of its scope, we must grant that Darwin has kept his muse fairly well under control.

In the following letters that passed between Darwin and James Watt, we may for a moment go behind the scenes and observe how the poet collected his material, noting especially that he required of the scientific facts a ‘gentlemanlike’ appearance; we may see that Watt, in turn, recognized the irrelevancy of introducing steam-engines in a poem on plants, and that he was not enthusiastic over popular poetry in general, and Darwin's in particular. Darwin writes:

As The Loves of the Plants pays me well, and as I write for pay, not for fame, I intend to publish The Economy of Vegetation in the spring. Now in this work I shall in a note mention something about steam-engines, which may occupy 2 or 3 pages. The historical part … I think to abstract from Harris's Lexicon and Chambers's Dictionary. But what must I add about Messrs. Watt and Boulton? This is the question. Now, if you will at a leisure hour tell me what the world may know about your improvement of the steam-engine, or anything about your experiments, or calculated facts about the power of your engines, or any other ingenious stuff for a note, I shall with pleasure insert it, either with or without your name, as you please.

If you do not take this trouble, I must make worse work of it myself, and celebrate your engines as well as I can. I wish the whole … to consist of such facts, or things, as may be rather agreeable; I mean gentlemanlike facts, not abstruse calculation only fit for philosophers.

To which Watt replied:

I know not how steam-engines come among the plants; I cannot find them in the Systema Naturae, by which I should conclude that they are neither plants, animals, nor fossils, otherwise they could not have escaped the notice of Linnaeus. However, if they belong to your system, no matter about the Swede; and your kind attention to us will certain make me furnish you with all the necessary materials for poetic readers, with a wish that something else in the author way would pay you better than poetry, though no man possesses a more amiable Muse, and you are a happy man that still find yourself equal to the embraces of such a frolicsome damsel!⁴⁴

Darwin's third long poem, The Temple of Nature, appeared in 1803, one year after his death. There seems to be no evidence to indicate when the poem was begun. The last words that Darwin ever wrote pertained to The Temple of Nature. In a letter, which he began to Edgeworth, dated April 17, 1802, he says: ‘My bookseller, Mr. Johnson, will not begin to print the Temple of Nature till the price of paper is fixed by Parliament. I suppose the present duty is paid. …’⁴⁵ Here the letter breaks off unfinished; in an hour or so the doctor was dead.

The poem consists of 1928 lines and is divided into the usual four cantos. Its subject matter is, if possible, of even vaster scope than the somewhat similar poem, The Economy of Vegetation. It is, however, more firmly knit together than the latter poem, more under control. Decidedly more skilful in technique than either of the earlier poems, it shows a great advance in maturity. It is the best of Darwin's three long poems.

There is no need of explaining the poem in detail, as the reader has already been introduced to it in Chapters Two and Three of this study [The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin]. As the subtitle states, it deals with ‘The Origin of Society’. Canto I treats of ‘The Production of Life’ and from the point of view of modern science contains some of the most interesting poetry that Darwin wrote. We learn that life began beneath the sea, that both vegetables and animals have all arisen from microscopic ‘animalcules’, and that they improve by reproduction. Thus:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.(46)

Canto II is devoted to ‘The Reproduction of Life’, treating of the varieties of reproductive systems, from the solitary generation of oysters and truffles, to the exalted love which animates mankind. Canto III, entitled ‘The Progress of the Mind’, introduces into the poem the psychology of Zoonomia and the matters of taste already discussed. Canto IV raises the problem ‘Of Good and Evil’, and attempts to justify the ways of God to men, in the manner of a scientist, however, not in that of a theologian. We shall return to this subject in the course of the chapter.

These are some of the delights in store for the reader of Erasmus Darwin's poetry. If he is not much impressed by the performance as poetry, he should at least be entertained by this amazing compendium of scientific theory and lore.

III. PRECEDENTS AND INFLUENCES

In Interlude III of The Loves of the Plants, the Bookseller enquires if Darwin has not ‘borrowed epithets, phrases, and even half a line occasionally from modern poems.’ The Doctor metaphorically replies:

It may be difficult to mark the exact boundary of what should be termed plagiarism: where the sentiment and expression are both borrowed without due acknowledgment, there can be no doubt;—single words, on the contrary, taken from other authors, cannot convict a writer of plagiarism; they are lawful game, wild by nature, the property of all who can capture them;—and perhaps a few common flowers of speech may be gathered, as we pass over our neighbour's enclosure, without stigmatizing us with the title of thieves; but we must not therefore plunder his cultivated fruit.

The four lines at the end of the plant Upas are imitated from Dr. Young's Night Thoughts. The line in the episode adjoined to Cassia, ‘The salt tear mingling with the milk he sips,’ is from an interesting and humane passage in Langhorne's Justice of Peace. There are probably many others, which, if I could recollect them, should here be acknowledged.

We may add at once to the list of ‘lawful game’ the line: ‘And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay,’⁴⁷ giving credit to John Milton. But our interest at present is not in combing through the poetry for such borrowing, but in building up a picture of the larger literary influences behind the poetic workmanship of Dr. Darwin.

It is clear that the ghost of Lucretius brushes each page of poetry that Darwin composed, but, ghostlike, the influence of the Latin poet is more pervasive than factual and detailed. One might put side by side the natural philosophy of De Rerum Natura, and the science of The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature and discover certain factual similarities, but the fruits of such labor are scarce worth the gathering. Darwin is too much the modern scientist to be greatly influenced by classical natural philosophy. He acquired his scientific knowledge through an extensive reading of the scholars of his own day, as the vast array of authorities referred to in his notes testifies. It may safely be said, therefore, that where Darwin might agree with Lucretius in his notions, the science of the eighteenth century also agreed with him.

Darwin had of course read Lucretius. In The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature there are five direct references to him.⁴⁸ All but two are mere casual literary allusions. The exceptions are two instances where Darwin disagrees with the Latin poet's analysis of the emotions of a man who stands safely on shore observing a shipwreck. They are all of slight significance except in certifying the fact that Darwin remembered his Lucretius well enough to quote from him. But what is striking is the similarity in aim and purpose in the two poets. Both professed to be scientists and set out to explain in poetry an elaborate system of natural history. Moreover, both hoped to make palatable to the general reading public the hard facts of learning through the use of fancy and imagination.

Darwin says in the ‘Advertisement’ to The Botanic Garden:

The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter, ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy. While their particular design is to induce the ingenious to cultivate the knowledge of Botany, by introducing them to the vestibule of that delightful science, and recommending to their attention the immortal works of the celebrated Swedish Naturalist, Linneus.

The Preface to The Temple of Nature expresses the same sort of aim, not ‘to instruct by deep researches of reasoning,’ but to bring ‘distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them.’

Here is clearly stated the aim of Darwin's poetic efforts. Likewise, Lucretius says:

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae;
… quoniam haec ratio plerumque videtur
tristior esse quibus non est tractata, retroque
volgus abhorret ab hac, volui tibi suaviloquenti
carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram
et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle,
si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere
versibus in nostris possem, dum percipis omnem
naturam rerum ac persentis utilitatem.(49)

There can be little doubt that Darwin's primary inspiration was De Rerum Natura. The whole gigantic scheme of The Botanic Garden and of The Temple of Nature, paralleling so closely as it does that of Lucretius, may well have been born of Darwin's reading of the Latin poet.

But Darwin was not indebted solely to Lucretius for the purpose and scope of his poetry. He links up with that long line of eighteenth-century didactic poets who fed the public's capacious maw of curiosity with every kind of tidbit of knowledge. We shall attempt to point out in this section such of these poems as seem to have some bearing on Darwin.⁵⁰

Samuel Garth's The Dispensary (1699), from its title at least, would appear to be sympathetic to the poetical endeavors of the Lichfield physician. But Garth's poem is more satiric than didactic, and if Darwin ever read The Dispensary it probably offended him. Much more to his taste, as well as closer to his own day, is John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health, published in 1744. The poem was esteemed in its day, managed to survive throughout the century, and was popular enough to be included in Anderson's poetic miscellany published in 1795. Although it first appeared when Darwin was a boy of twelve, he must have read it sometime during his life.

Its four books treat of climate, diet, exercise, and the ‘passions.’ Though—like The Dispensary—written by a physician, any intelligent man might have given as good advice for preserving the health as Dr. Armstrong prescribed; and whatever medical knowledge it evinces seems pathetically slight in the shadow of the vast bulk of Zoonomia. The Art of Preserving Health would appear to Darwin as ‘popular’ and contemptible. Moreover, we are on quite the wrong track when we seek sources for Darwin's poetry in poems on health and pathology for Darwin himself never wrote a single poem on the subject. Here and there we may find scattered references to medicine (such as the account of the Peruvian bark and medicinal herbs in Canto III of The Loves of the Plants, and of the Buxton baths in the third canto of The Economy of Vegetation), but they are wholly incidental. One wonders, had he lived longer, if his next poem would have been on the subject closest to him—his own profession. The only relation that such a poem as The Art of Preserving Health might have to Darwin's poetry is that it would serve as an authority for dressing out science in verse.

A much closer parallel may be found in the genre of didactic poetry which dealt with gardening and agricultural subjects. As early as 1708 appeared John Philips' Cyder. Darwin, with his objections to ‘great ingurgitations of spirituous potations’ would have disapproved of much in Philips' poem, but there are one or two interesting parallels between Cyder and The Loves of the Plants. Certainly anyone familiar with Darwin's poetry would instantly think of him when Philips says:

The Prudent will observe, what Passions reign
In various Plants (for not to Man alone,
But all wide Creation, Nature gave
Love and Aversion): Everlasting Hate
The Vine to Ivy bears, nor less abhors
The Coleworts Rankness; but, with amorous Twine,
Clasps the tall Elm: the Paestan Rose unfolds
Her Bud, more lovely, near the fetid Leek,
(Crest of stout Britons) and enhances thence
The Price of her celestial scent: The Gourd,
Th' approaching Olive, with Resentment fly
Her fatty Fibres, and with tendrils creep
Diverse, detesting Contact; whilst the Fig
Contemns not Rue, nor Sage's humble Leaf,
Close neighbouring: The Herefordian Plant
Caresses freely the contiguous Peach,
Hazel, and weight-resisting Palm, and likes
T' approach the Quince, and th' Elder's pithy Stem;
Uneasie, seated by funereal Yeugh,
Or Walnut, (whose malignant Touch impairs
All generous Fruits), nor near the bitter Dews
Of Cherries. Therefore, weigh the Habits well
Of Plants, how they associate best, nor let
Ill Neighbourhood corrupt thy hopeful Graffs.(51)

While this is not exactly Linnaean botany, we have passion attributed to plants. Moreover, Philips' passage on Experience has something of the ring of Darwin's allegory.⁵² But of course all that can be said is that Philips and Darwin are writing in the same genre, and if Darwin had read Cyder, it strengthened his faith in the success of a botanical poem.

Christopher Smart's The Hop-Garden (1752) was modeled on Cyder and takes its place among these agricultural poems. Like Darwin, Smart introduces mythology and history in profusion, but the tone of The Hop-Garden is pastoral while The Botanic Garden is entirely scientific. The poem stands, however, as yet another precedent for Darwin to pin his faith to. William Somerville's The Chase, which appeared in 1735, is an elaborate versified treatise on hunting, and while it presents no parallels with Darwin, it adds another link to the chain of bucolic didacticism. John Dyer's The Fleece (1757) presents to the eager reader a full account of the breeds of sheep, of their care, of the varieties of wool, of the art of weaving, and of the magnificent trade which old England has developed in connection with this staple. The Fleece and The Botanic Garden have nothing in common except that both devote a passage to spinning and weaving, for which work modern inventions are recommended.⁵³

The closest parallel to The Botanic Garden of all of these agricultural poems, and one which may actually have had some definite influence on Darwin, is James Grainger's The Sugar Cane, which appeared in 1764. Here again, strangely enough, we have a physician writing. Grainger was living in St. Christopher, in the West Indies, and soon after his arrival there conceived the design of writing a poem on the cultivation of sugar cane. ‘My inducements to this arduous undertaking,’ he says, ‘were, not only the importance and novelty of the subject, but more especially this consideration; that, as the face of this country was wholly different from that of Europe; so whatever hand copied its appearances, however rude, could not fail to enrich poetry with many new and picturesque images.’⁵⁴ Grainger is modest enough to cast doubt on his achievement in enriching poetry but he believes that he has at least succeeded in his mission as an instructor.

Such a project would undoubtedly catch the fancy of Dr. Darwin who had an insatiable curiosity for descriptions of topography, especially of the less known outposts of civilization. Couple this with his interest in plant life and the poem would be irresistible in its appeal. The piece was well-known, having been read in polite circles, and reviewed—disparagingly—by Dr. Johnson in The London Chronicle the year in which it appeared. It is dangerous to assert that a person must have read a book because it was popular and because it would have appealed to him. Moreover, one would expect to find such a poem as The Sugar Cane recommended for the young ladies in Darwin's ‘Catalogue of Books’ appended to his treatise on Female Education, a list which includes Mason's English Garden, and a whole series of books on geography. Even so, there is a strong presumption that Darwin knew the poem.

There is a general resemblance between Grainger's description of the plant-life on the island of St. Christopher and Darwin's The Botanic Garden.⁵⁵ There are certainly no close parallels, however; it is only that both poets are utilizing the same type of material for their poetry. But what may have exerted a definite influence on Darwin, is Grainger's use of notes, particularly those on plants. They are as profuse as Darwin's own notorious footnotes, and in reading them one almost feels that it is Darwin himself who is speaking. Like Darwin, Grainger amplifies in these notes the account in the poem of various trees and plants, explaining their uses and exhibiting a rather extensive knowledge of botany.

Out of the many notes to The Sugar Cane, we may note especially two which bring Darwin to mind. One is Grainger's note on the Banian tree, or Indian fig.⁵⁶ Darwin also has a note on the ficus indica, referring the reader to a history of Jamaica.⁵⁷ Secondly, as an illustration of the similar type of notes used by both poets, I quote the following note to line 503 of the first book of The Sugar Cane, calling attention especially to Grainger's reference to Linnaeus:

Linnaeus's names for this useful tree is Haemotoxylar, but it is better known to physicians by that of Lignum campechense. Its virtues, as a medicine, and properties as an ingredient in dying, need not be enumerated in this place. It makes a no less strong than beautiful hedge in the West-Indies, where it rises to a considerable height.

One or two illustrations may not suggest very satisfactorily any special resemblance between Grainger and Darwin; The Sugar Cane, with its notes, must be read through before the similarity between the two poets is clear. Nor is it to be supposed that Darwin learned botany from Grainger, or that he actually made use of the latter's notes. But we may advance the hypothesis that Darwin might have read Grainger, and might have taken from him a suggestion for a didactic poem, strictly on botany, and elaborately annotated.

Robert Dodsley's Agriculture, which appeared in 1772, would also suggest to Darwin the possibility of such a poem as The Botanic Garden. Here we have an account of various soils and manures, of hedging and ditching, and of planting timber trees. The following quotation on mineral deposits suggests Canto II of The Economy of Vegetation:

With various blessings teems thy fruitful womb.
Lo! from the depth of many a yawning mine,
Thy fossil treasures rise. Thy blazing hearths
From deep sulphureous pits, consumeless stores
Of fuel boast. The oil-imbibing earth,
The fuller's mill assisting, safe defies
All foreign rivals in the clothier's art.
The builder's stone thy numerous quarries hide;
With lime, its close concomitant. The hills,
The barren hills of Derby's wildest peak,
In lead abound; soft, fusile, malleable;
Whose ample sheets my venerable domes,
From rough inclement storms of wind and rain,
In safety clothe. Devona's ancient mines,
Whose treasures tempted first Phoenicia's sons
To count thy commerce, still exhaustless, yield
The valued ore, from whence, Britannia, thou
Thine honour'd name deriv'st. Nor want'st thou store
Of that all-useful metal, the support
Of ev'ry art mechanic. Hence arise
In Dean's large forest numerous glowing kilns,
The rough rude ore calcening; whence convey'd
To the fierce furnace, its intenser heat
Melts the hard mass which flows an iron stream,
On sandy beds below: and stiffening there,
A pondrous lump, but to the hammer tam'd,
Takes from the forge, in bars, its final form.(58)

Thus Darwin was not the first poet to celebrate the practical resources of nature. Moreover, Dodsley has a passage on medicinal herbs, naming various plants of this sort and explaining their medical properties.⁵⁹ Finally, the poem is supplied with explanatory foot notes which, while not as elaborate or as ‘Darwinian’ as Grainger's, lay one more stone in paving the way for The Botanic Garden.

William Mason's confused poem on The English Garden, the four books of which appeared between the years 1772 and 1781, was very much admired by Darwin. Not only did he recommend it for his young ladies, but, as we have seen, he wrote a poem ‘For the Monument of the Rev. Dr. W. Mason.’⁶⁰ However, The English Garden is quite a different kind of poem from The Botanic Garden. The former treats of matters of taste in laying out a garden while the latter is really no garden at all. Even Part II has not even a suggestion of a mise en scène.

The English Garden, however, does relate itself to certain aspects of Darwin's theory of taste. In Book I, Mason lays down the precept that nature should not be copied exactly:

… … beauty best is taught
By those, the favour'd few, whom heav'n has lent
The power to seize, select, and reunite
Her loveliest features; and of these to form
The archetype complete of sovereign grace.
Here nature sees her fairest forms more fair;
Owns them for hers, yet owns herself excell'd
By what herself produc'd … …(61)

In this we recognize both Reynolds and Darwin. Moreover, Mason praises undulations and curves, a canon of taste which was fast becoming a cliché. Mason objects to a garden laid out in geometrical patterns, to which judgment Darwin agreed. His glorification of natural scenery⁶² is in accord with Darwin's conception of the picturesque. Such are the parallels between The English Garden and Darwin's idea of taste, but except where these ideas are incidentally introduced into The Botanic Garden, The English Garden had no more relationship to the poetry of Darwin than do the principles of landscape architecture enunciated by ‘Capability’ Brown.

We come finally to the last and most distinguished member of this group, William Cowper, whose The Task appeared in 1785. Book III is entitled ‘The Garden’, and is devoted mostly to the pleasures of cultivating the soil, and to the joys of pruning, making cold frames, and planting flower seeds. Anna Seward has told us that Darwin did not like Cowper's poetry, although he included The Task in the ‘Catalogue of Books’ appended to his Female Education. We look in vain for any similarities between The Task and Darwin's poetry, except in one small but significant detail, which we find in Cowper's poem. Speaking of the cultivation of fruit trees, he says:

Indulg'd in what they wish, they soon supply
Large foliage, overshadowing golden flow'rs,
Blown on the summit of th' apparent fruit.
These have their sexes; and, when summer shines,
The bee transports the fertilizing meal
From flow'r to flow'r, and ev'n the breathing air
Wafts the rich prize to its appointed use.(63)

Thus in Cowper, and in Cowper only, may be found an actual anticipation of the subject matter of The Loves of the Plants, Darwin's first and most popular long poem. But the case must not be overstated. Darwin, of course, did not take the hint from Cowper, for The Loves of the Plants was begun seven years before The Task was published. It is simply a matter of interest that in all these poems on gardening and agriculture, only Cowper mentions the Linnaean system of botany which was to be the subject of Darwin's poem.

The poems, therefore, to which Darwin set his hand did not meet an unprepared public. From the beginning of the century there had appeared, one after another, poems of a similarly didactic nature. Having traced the general (and, in a few cases, particular) similarities between these poems and Darwin's contributions to the genre, our next step is to determine the principal differences between Darwin's poetry and that of these other didactic poets. Dissimilarities of one nature or another have already been mentioned, and a useless array of minor differences might easily be marshalled. But in general the poetry of Darwin is characterized by three peculiarities: his use of the ‘heroic couplet’; his scientific approach to his subject; and his use of allegory.

The first two require little discussion. All of the poets of which we have taken note (with the exception of Garth) made use of blank verse, as they are all connected with the growing movement which rejected the favorite Augustan verse-form and revived blank verse. We must impute to Darwin's lack of foresight his use of a metre which had grown decadent. He failed to perceive the direction of the wind, and had he tried his hand at blank verse it is possible that he might have been more respected by his successors. But it was not sheer bad taste that directed Darwin's choice. The ‘heroic couplet’, with its precision and its easily sustained animation, is an admirable medium for didacticism, and especially for that of a less gifted poet. Darwin's fluent couplets are far more readable than the wooden blank verse with which one is tortured in Mason and Dodsley. It is simply unfortunate that the couplet was out-moded when Darwin took it up.

The second difference which has been pointed out is one that almost explains itself. Darwin was a better scientist than psychologist, a better scientist than poet. His real distinction lies in what is entirely outside the field of this study—his anticipation of the scientific discoveries of Lamarck and of Charles Darwin. His knowledge of the subject of his poetry was so far greater than that of any other didactic poet which we have considered, that it is absurd to make comparisons in this respect. Hence the scientific tone of his poetry, the accuracy of most of his descriptions, the fundamental soundness of many of his theories, and the vast wealth of information with which he packs his notes, render him distinctly outstanding.

The third difference, the matter of allegory, requires at least some investigation. Personification is, of course, a feature which appears here and there in many of the poems which we have considered, but they employ no consistent scheme of allegory. For the most part, they use no allegory at all, and are content to explain their facts as facts, with only an occasional embellishment of personification. But with Darwin it was different. We have already discussed his fundamental requirement of the language of poetry, that it appeal to our sense of sight.⁶⁴ We have seen also, that he achieved this effect principally through the use of allegory and personification.⁶⁵ We are not surprised, therefore, on opening The Loves of the Plants, to read in the ‘Proem’: ‘Lo, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a lighted canvas, and magnified into apparent life!’ Moreover it is to be expected that the two poems which followed The Loves of the Plants should be patterned on a definitely allegorical design.

In The Loves of the Plants, Darwin follows the simple method of personifying the plants, but in The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature he draws on the Eleusinian mysteries and on the Rosicrucian doctrines for his machinery. Regarding the allegory of The Economy of Vegetation, he says:

The Rosicrucian doctrine of Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders,⁶⁶ was thought to afford a proper machinery for a Botanic poem; as it is probable that they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures representing the elements.

Many of the important operations of Nature were shadowed or allegorized in the heathen mythology, as the first Cupid springing from the Egg of Night, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, the Rape of Prosperine, the Congress of Jupiter and Juno, Death and Resuscitation of Adonis, &c. many of which are ingeniously explained in the works of Bacon, Vol. V. p. 47. 4th Edit. London, 1778. The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which after the discovery of the alphabet were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome. Allusions to those fables were therefore thought proper ornaments to a philosophical poem and are occasionally introduced either as represented by the poets, or preserved in the numerous gems and medallions of antiquity.⁶⁷

The four cantos of the poem, therefore, are based on these four Rosicrucian elements; Canto I is devoted to the Nymphs of Fire (Darwin avoids the name Salamander), Canto II to the Gnomes, or earth, Canto III to the Nymphs, or water, and Canto IV to the Sylphs, or air.

The machinery of The Temple of Nature, is derived from the Eleusinian mysteries, of which he gives a brief account in the Preface to the poem. He says:

The Deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome, were derived from men famous in those early times, as in the ages of hunting, pasturage, and agriculture. The histories of some of their actions recorded in Scripture, or celebrated in the heathen mythology, are introduced, as the Author hopes, without impropriety, into his account of these remote periods of human society.

In the Eleusinian mysteries the philosophy of the works of Nature, with the origin of the progress of society, are believed to have been taught by allegoric scenery, explained by the Hierophant to the initiated, which gave rise to the machinery of the following poem.⁶⁸

Such, then, is the general scheme of Darwin's allegory. The hierophant, or high priestess, explains to the initiated the works of nature, which appear in the dress of deities of one sort or another. To aid the reader in following the maze of allegory, Darwin from time to time explains in his footnotes the mythological material which he employs.

Certainly no such elaborate devices as these may be found in any of the other didactic poems which we have reviewed. The two poems, with all of these trimmings, are nothing less than full-blown epics. We might say that they are a sort of Paradise Lost, written by a scientist. Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum, to which Darwin has referred,⁶⁹ is the poet's immediate inspiration for using classical mythology to allegorize the works of nature. But an interesting possibility suggests itself, that Darwin might also have been influenced in this matter by Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, a new edition of which appeared in 1784. Here we have a poem in which the whole science of physiology is set forth in allegory. We have no means of knowing whether Darwin had read Fletcher, but his poetry was, of course, well known. The 1784 edition appeared when Darwin was contemplating allegorizing botany, and the subject of The Purple Island would appeal to Dr. Darwin.

Here, at least, was a celebrated example of exactly the kind of device which Darwin hoped to achieve. To be sure, The Purple Island is quite unlike Darwin's poetry in its use of the Spenserian stanza, in its Elizabethan flavor, and indeed in its subject. Moreover, its allegory is more consistently sustained than Darwin's. But we cannot overlook the fact that it accomplishes precisely what Darwin aimed to do—it teaches science in terms made visual through the medium of allegory. In this respect, it seems plausible to add The Purple Island to that group of poems which may possibly have influenced Darwin, but which certainly paved the way for the public reception of his poetry.

In this survey, we have deferred mention of two poems which should properly be classed alone, because they are apart from the agricultural group which we have considered, and because they appear to have a more direct relationship to The Economy of Vegetation and to The Temple of Nature than any of the others. These are Sir Richard Blackmore's Creation, which appeared in 1712, and Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty, which was published anonymously in 1735. Both are long, dull, didactic poems on the creation and structure of the world and its inhabitants. Blackmore includes in his poem as much, if not more, classical philosophy as he does science, and aims a violent attack against atheism. Brooke confines himself, perhaps, a little more closely to science (if his limited knowledge may be dignified with such a term), but he too has one purpose in writing—to confound atheism and establish the conventional dogmas of religion.

As early as 1804, in a criticism of Anna Seward's Memoirs of Dr. Darwin appearing in The Edinburgh Review, the critic suggested that Universal Beauty bore a strong similarity to Darwin's last two poems. But there are two immense differences between Darwin's poetry and that of both Brooke and Blackmore. The first is, that the natural history of the latter two poets is thoroughly unscientific from the modern point of view, whatever scraps of information they may possess representing the early gropings of scientific investigation. This is in strong contrast to the really vast scientific equipment at the command of Darwin, a knowledge which represented progressive investigation instead of theories that faced backwards toward the past. The second, and most important difference, is the fact that neither Blackmore nor Brooke was really interested in teaching science; their whole efforts were directed toward propping up the structure of traditional theology which showed signs of toppling down. Nothing could have been farther from Darwin's intention.

Let us illustrate. Blackmore, having described earthly vicissitudes, death, and corruption, says:

Since man is born to so much woe and care,
Must still new terrors dread, new sorrows bear,
Does it not suit the state of human kind,
There should preside a good Almighty mind?
A cause supreme, that might all nature steer,
Avert our danger, and prevent our fear,
Who, when implor'd, might timely succour give,
Solace our anguish, and our wants relieve:
Father of comfort might our souls sustain,
When prest with grief and mitigate our pain.(70)

Brooke, after rhapsodizing on God's care of the ‘little Halcyons’ which nest on the waves, the Lord checking the winter's storm and the rage of the ‘reluctant main’ to protect the fledglings until they are able to fly, bursts into a hymn of praise:

Eternal! Thine is every round of time,
The circling season, and the varying clime;
Thine! every dictate of the conscious breast;
Thine! every texture of the genial nest,
The oval embryon, and the fostering ray;
And Thine the life that struggles into day!
To Thee Thy callow importuners cry,
Gracious Thy Ear, and bounteous Thy Supply;
Till the flown choirs revel consort raise,
And hymn to Heaven the rhapsody of praise!(71)

Darwin, however, neither asked nor expected mercy. In the fourth canto of The Temple of Nature, after representing in a forceful series of pictures how every creature preys upon every other, Darwin demonstrates the ultimate good of the universe by pointing out that because of death and decay new life is continually generated and progress is assured. His answer to the terrible menace of death is a clear-cut scientific explanation of natural economy.

So human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.
Thus while new forms reviving tribes acquire
Each passing moment, as the old expire;
Like insects swarming in the noontide bower,
Rise into being, and exist an hour;
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with life;
Which buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth's vast surface kindles, as it rolls!(72)

The survival of the fittest! This is the voice of modern science speaking, one hundred and fifty years in advance of Blackmore and Brooke. Darwin, with boldness and honesty, faces the old theological conception of an attitude in nature benevolent to man, and adducing the incontrovertible fact of the death and replacement of all organisms from ‘human progenies’ to ‘insects swarming in the noon-tide bower,’ concludes that the phenomenon is but a biological process impartial as it is inevitable.

Yet with this chasm of separation between these poems of Brooke and Blackmore, and those of Darwin, the case of a probable influence cannot be dismissed as devoid of ‘the slightest foundation,’ as Ernst Krause says.⁷³ On the contrary, they may have exerted a very definite influence on him. If Darwin had read these poems, what would be more natural for him to say (in one of his characteristic fits of passion): ‘This stuff is nonsense! I will write a poem that is really scientific.’ We need not enquire too seriously if inspiration thus dramatically descended upon him like the mantle of Elijah; but it is perfectly conceivable that Darwin should have known these writers, and that they should have suggested to him the possibility of a poem which would be not a prop to theology, but an exposition of the most recent scientific theories of the day. It is a plausible hypothesis, therefore, that Creation and Universal Beauty, as contrary as they are to the spirit of Darwin but with their close superficial resemblance to The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature, represent—next to Lucretius—the strongest influence on Dr. Darwin's muse of any single poems.

IV. CONCLUSION: AN APPRAISEMENT

We are now ready to throw into clear focus the diversified traits of Erasmus Darwin which engendered his poetry, and to appraise his poems. First, Darwin was a scientist who infused scientific fact and theory with a high sense of progress, of intellectual and spiritual development perhaps even to the point of revolution.⁷⁴ He unites with his scientific and philosophic attitudes clearly defined aesthetic opinions, and the whole is transformed into fancy and allegory expressed in dextrous heroic couplets. We have not only a man of quick intellect with occasional flashes of genius, but also a scholar. He was no professional scientist, but a man whose life had been immersed in scientific and philosophic studies and who had been the constant companion of illustrious scientists. Nor was he a professional writer or critic, but a man with a wide knowledge of poetry both classic and English, and a thorough familiarity with aesthophysiology, the historical method of criticism of the eighteenth century. Finally, Darwin was a shrewd man capable of laying his finger on the pulse of public taste.

Darwin's intense confidence in the progress and development of nature and society acts as a spiritual driving-force throughout The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature, yet he has no great imaginative power, ever hanging close to earth in the manner of a very rational doctor with a great deal of common sense as well as learning. He was incapable of transmuting his relish for knowledge and his fine sensitivity to vistas ever opening to the human mind into a concentrated purpose that would both unify and empassion his poetry. He was inventive, but not creative as are the greater poets who sublimate strong emotion with intense intellectual insight. His own limited conception of imagination—ideas which produce an involuntary revery excited by pleasure or pain—has, perhaps ironically, claimed him to the exclusion of anything greater. He possesses only a species of thin fancy which rarely stirs the emotions and which often holds our intellectual interest with slipping fingers.

A stronger imaginative conception might have unified the multiplicity of Darwin's material. Formlessness is one of his serious faults. His artistic patterns are too flimsy to hold together the body of thought that he presents. We cannot censure him for being no genius, but he is culpable for the undisciplined organization of the material of his long poems, since the task of unification—selecting, rejecting, and arranging according to a definite artistic scheme—was not one, we may safely assume, beyond the intelligence of Erasmus Darwin.

At first sight The Loves of the Plants may appear to the reader innocent of even the most basic organization, a distortion of a scientific system into aimless fragments, but although Darwin has wisely refrained from building up his poem according to Linnaeus' methodical classification of plants (which he outlines in his Preface) he has attempted a species of dramatic unity. The first canto is light and frolicsome, dealing humorously with the marriages of the plants, the second strikes a ‘wilder note’ introducing the winds and gales which spread abroad the light-winged seeds, the third is of more fearful aspect with its array of deadly plants, and the fourth returns rather lamely to the ‘tuneful’ mirth of the first. Yet it is all rather bewildering. The unity is too superficial. Confusion is made worse by the abundant introduction of irrelevant matter; balloons and thistles are indiscriminately intermixed. It may be admitted that the ambition to present in detached form the ‘beauties’ of a specific scientific system is a task that defies artistic unity.

The Economy of Vegetation is built on more solid framework. Each canto is devoted to one of the four ‘elements’—fire, earth, water, and air. It is knit together by Rosicrucian allegory. But there is lack of cohesion within the allegorical scheme. From our survey of the poem above it is evident that the relation of the multifarious matter is erratic, and that transition from salt mines in Cracow to Mars and Venus caught by Vulcan, from a geyser in Iceland to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, is disagreeably abrupt. These leaps, if not in the dark at least in twilight, wrench the poem into fantastic, indeed ludicrous shapes. Closely connected with this lack of cohesion is Darwin's failure to reduce his matter to essentials that give a clarified impression of the scientific process, vitalizing the facts with only such allusions as are strictly consonant with the material. Scientific fact and theory, classical allusions, allegorical symbolism and contemporary illustration are heaped together in profusion with no sense of selectivity, of poetic fitness, or of artistic design. Darwin's teeming brain has betrayed him into chaotic confusion. His well-fed Pegasus has unhorsed the rider and galloped off with the winds.

Darwin has gone a long way toward overcoming these difficulties in his last poem, The Temple of Nature. It is impossible to see any great advance in his poetic art during the fourteen years between the appearance of The Loves of the Plants and of The Temple of Nature except in a firmer control of his matter. He divides his subject—nature—into four well defined phases: the production of life, the reproduction of life, the progress of the mind, and good and evil. He begins with God, the First Cause, and progresses from the microscopic beginnings of life beneath the sea through the system of reproduction and the intricate evolution of the human mind, and concludes with the most advanced phase, the moral concept. The plan provides for a close-knit unity, and for continuous and progressive development. Moreover there is greater internal unity since each canto exhibits a cohesion of thought and a freedom from irrelevancy that comes with his growing sureness as a craftsman. It is to be noted also that the allegory is more closely integrated with the subject; there is not so much combing of the classics for any kind of striking fragment of symbolism, but a consistent foundation for the allegory, drawn from the Eleusinian mysteries, which taught the origin and progress of society by allegoric scenery expounded by the Hierophant. For this purpose Darwin has used appropriate dieties of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. As a result of this more disciplined planning, his last poem is integrated in content with an internal progression that attains something of artistic unity.

Even without great imaginative insight and in spite of formlessness and obscurity, Darwin's poetry might have survived had it not suffered from a greater strain. His greatest shortcoming as a poet is his artificiality, resulting from his extensive use of allegory and personification, and from his diction. He does not stumble into this pitfall entirely through ignorance and lack of taste, but because he is practicing his theory that poetry primarily must be visual or otherwise sensuous, excluding all abstract language.

Now how can one write a poem on scientific processes and be pictorial and not abstract? Allegory, personification, and simile is the only answer. Everything must be interpreted through symbols, if fantastic none the less concrete. If no concrete symbol can be found, then the abstraction must be addressed directly, hailed by name and importuned, and thus dragged bodily before the mind of the reader. With Darwin these figures of speech are not mere idle ornamentation; they are the expression of his carefully conceived theory of poetry.

Thus the Nile in flood is described:

          Creative Nile, as taught in ancient song,
So charm'd to life his animated throng;
O'er his wide realms the slow-subsiding flood
Left the rich treasures of organic mud;
While with quick growth young vegetation yields
Her blushing orchards, and her waving fields;
Pomona's hand replenish'd Plenty's horn.
And Ceres laugh'd amid her seas of corn.—(75)

Or, in explaining the combination of oxygen and light which forms life-giving air, Darwin employs personification and finishes off with the allegory of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche.

          When Morn, escorted by the dancing Hours,
O'er the bright plains her dewy lustre showers;
Till from her sable chariot Eve serene
Drops the dark curtain o'er the brilliant scene;
You form with chemic hands the airy surge,
Mix with broad vans, with shadowy tridents urge.
Sylphs! from each sun-bright leaf, that twinkling shakes,
O'er Earth's green lap, or shoots amid her lakes,
Your playful bands with simpering lips invite,
And wed the enamour'd Oxygene to Light.—
Round their white necks with fingers interwove,
Cling the fond Pair with unabating love;
Hand link'd in hand on buoyant step they rise,
And soar and glisten in unclouded skies.
Whence in bright floods the Vital Air expands,
And with concentric spheres involves the lands;
          So pure, so soft, with sweet attraction shone
Fair Psyche, kneeling at the ethereal throne;
Won with coy smiles the admiring court of Jove,
And warm'd the bosom of unconquer'd Love.—(76)

Such devices, in themselves deplorable, annoy and disgust when they swarm in troops throughout the poems, obscuring all reality beneath gaudy images. In revulsion the reader longs for simplicity, for clear directness. Darwin achieves so well his visual legerdemain that the eyes ache from his garish chromos.

His diction pursues the same goal. It must be pictorial; it must stimulate the activity of the senses. In the damning words of Coleridge:

Into this error the author of The Botanic Garden has fallen, through the whole of which work, I will venture to assert, there are not twenty images described as a man would assert them in a state of excitment. The poem is written with all the tawdry industry of a milliner anxious to dress up a doll in silks and satins. Darwin laboured to make his style fine and gaudy, by accumulating and applying all the sonorous and handsome-looking words in the language. This is not poetry.⁷⁷

Illustrations of this tendency are only too abundant. Among the worst, perhaps, is the story of the ‘Eagle,’ a girl in plague-stricken Holland, who, struck down by the disease, is heroically attended by her lover. The whole thing is intended to illustrate the function of winds in blowing away noxious vapors.

          Thus when the Plague, upborne on Belgian air,
Look'd through the mist and shook his clotted hair,
O'er shrinking nations steer'd malignant clouds,
And rain'd destruction on the gasping crouds.
The beauteous Eagle felt the envenom'd dart,
Slow roll'd her eye, and feebly throbb'd her heart;
Each fervid sigh seem'd shorter than the last,
And starting Friendship shunn'd her, as she passed.
—With weak unsteady step the fainting Maid
Seeks the cold garden's solitary shade,
Sinks on the pillowy moss her drooping head,
And prints with lifeless limbs her leafy bed.
—On wings of Love her plighted Swain pursues,
Shades her from winds, and shelters her from dews,
Extends on tapering poles the canvas roof,
Spreads o'er the straw-wove matt the flaxon woof,
Sweet buds and blossoms on her bolster strows,
And binds his kerchief round her aching brows;
Sooths with soft kiss, with tender accents charms,
And clasps the bright Infection in his arms.—(78)
          etc., etc.

In the manifestation of Darwin's poetic theory of visual images we find a mixture of the vivid and the trite. Always there is excess. He opens the sluice gates and out pours a torrent of agitated adjectives. There is no restraint. He is never content to imply, to suggest, nor even to describe an object with the dignity of simple clarity. Always he must evoke a powerful sense impression.

Anna Seward was perspicacious enough to detect in a measure this defect. She says: ‘his warmest admirers will surely acknowledge that he insists on poetry being dressed with too elaborate magnificence.’⁷⁹ Comprehending his effort to appeal to the vision, she remarks: ‘If she [Darwin's muse] impersonizes too lavishly; if devoted to picture, she covers every inch of the walls with landscapes, allegoric groups, and with single figures; … yet be it remembered, that it is always in the reader's power to draw each picture from the mass, and to insulate it by his attention.’⁸⁰ Moreover, a critic in The Edinburgh Review⁸¹ pointed out that although Darwin's pictures are bold and vivid, they lack the delicate shadings which appeal to the emotions as well as to the eye. The poetry becomes monotonous, said the critic, since the poet addresses himself to the mind only through the medium of the senses, his theory not allowing any subordination of parts.

Darwin's inability to restrain this exuberant urge to paint pictures produces obfuscation, with the loss of simplicity and naturalness. He stands as a supreme example of bad taste in ornate language. It is not his disorganization, it is not his couplets, it is not his fantastic subject matter that repels the modern reader; artificiality of expression is the corruption at the heart of his poetry that has killed it forever.

Although there may be a great deal of false art in Darwin's poetry, his deficiencies do not fill the whole picture. There is much that constitutes genuine and honest literature.

If Darwin lacks emotion and deep imagination, he has the salutary tonic of animation. Thus the poet compares to Galatea the Ulva, a seaweed which buoyed by bladders of air among its leaves, forms immense floating fields of vegetation:

Thus o'er the waves, which gently bend and swell,
Fair Galatea steers her silver shell;
Her playful Dolphins stretch the silken rein,
Hear her sweet voice, and glide along the main.
As round the wild meandering coast she moves
By gushing rills, rude cliffs, and nodding groves;
Each by her pine, the Wood-nymphs wave their locks,
And wondering Naiads peep amid the rocks;
Pleased trains of Mermaids rise from coral cells;
Admiring Tritons sound their twisted shells;
Charm'd o'er the car pursuing Cupids sweep,
Their snow-white pinions twinkling in the deep;
And, as the lustre of her eye she turns,
Soft sighs the Gale, and amorous Ocean burns.(82)

In this little description there is the grace and delicacy of touch which charms into animation the botanic lore of The Loves of the Plants. Pictorial clarity is partly responsible for this vitality; Darwin enables us to see the Naiads that ‘peep amid the rocks,’ the Tritons with their ‘twisted shells,’ and Cupid whose snow-white pinions twinkle in the deep. In harmony with his theory of poetry, it is the concrete and visual here that appeals.

But more than this, the vitality emanates from Darwin's felicitous use of the heroic couplet. In this often maligned but very difficult verse Darwin is something of a genius, composing with impeccable correctness of rhythm and rime, yet sensitive to melodic nuances. He combines exactness of technique with flexibility and malleableness. Professor Brandl has pointed out that after examining 4337 lines of Darwin's poetry, he finds only 34 impure rimes and 40 ‘eye-rimes.’ Ninety-nine per cent of the rimes are therefore blameless.⁸³ He takes Darwin slightly to task for his tendency to make the rime word a common word, but if this eases the task of the rimer the offense seems to me negligible.

It is interesting to note that Darwin recognized that his talent was for the couplet, and cultivated it exclusively. After pointing out that Darwin had neither skill nor interest in blank verse or the sonnet, Anna Seward says: ‘Absorbed in the resolve of bringing the couplet-measure to a degree of sonorous perfection, which should transcend the numbers of Dryden and Pope, he sought to confine poetic excellence exclusively to that style.’⁸⁴

In the description of the Ulva we may note the frequent substitution of an initial stressed for an unstressed syllable in the first foot of the line (lines 1, 4, 7, 11, 14), an irregularity employed not only for variety but also for appropriate emphasis. Alliteration is frequent, and there is subtle harmony of internal vowels, as in the last line.

The opening lines of The Temple of Nature are among the smoothest and most dignified that Darwin wrote. They have been quoted above, but will bear repetition.

          By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress'd on Nature by the Great First Cause,
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.
          Four past eventful Ages then recite,
And give the fifth, new-born of Time, to light;
The silken tissue of their joys disclose,
Swell with deep chords the mumur of their woes;
Their laws, their labours, and their loves proclaim,
And chant their virtues to the trump of Fame.
          Immortal Love! who ere the morn of Time,
On wings outstretch'd, o'er Chaos hung sublime;
Warm'd into life the bursting egg of Night,
And gave young Nature to admiring Light!—

There is here, first of all, a perfect clarity of thought, a lucid statement of the theme of the poem. There is no superfluity of images, no wordy decoration. There is a gravity and dignity which is almost noble. This skilful use of the couplet is the flowering of Darwin's maturest genius. Variety is achieved by happy use of the caesural pause, line 3 containing two abrupt pauses in succession, line 4 containing one pause near the beginning, lines 5 and 6 broken in the middle, line 13 broken twice for emphasis, et cetera. At happy intervals are unbroken lines, one long sustained breath, as 1, 2, 12, 14, 17, and 18. Here the cadence is sweeping and prolonged. By skilful harmonizing of vowels the tonal quality of the lines is rich.

Coleridge compared The Botanic Garden to ‘the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory.’⁸⁵ Yet ice, glittering, cold, and transitory may sometimes be very attractive. Darwin has achieved at times a brilliant vividness, an almost rigid distinctness. In the following description of metals his artistic effect suggests the work of a lapidary.

          Hence glows, refulgent Tin! thy chrystal grains,
And tawny Copper shoots her azure veins;
Zink lines his fretted vault with sable ore,
And dull Galena tessellates the floor;
On vermil beds in Idria's mighty caves
The living Silver rolls its ponderous waves;
With gay refractions bright Platina shines,
And studs with squander'd stars his dusky mines;
Long threads of netted gold, and silvery darts,
Inlay the Lazuli, and pierce the Quartz;—
—Whence roof'd with silver beam'd Peru, of old,
And hapless Mexico was paved with gold.(86)

The use here of ‘metallic’ words, the marked frequency of voiced consonants, produces the effect of hardness, minimizing the melody of vowels and sibilants which was emphasized in the passage on the Ulva.

The poet can at times rise to intense description, vibrant with motion.

          High in the frozen North where Heccla glows,
And melts in torrents his coeval snows;
O'er isles and oceans sheds a sanguine light,
Or shoots red stars amid the ebon night;
When, at his base intomb'd, with bellowing sound
Fell Giesar roar'd, and struggling shook the ground;
Pour'd from red nostrils, with her scalding breath,
A boiling deluge o'er the blasted heath;
And, wide in air, in misty volumes hurl'd
Contagious atoms o'er the alarmed world;
Nymphs! Your bold myriads broke the infernal spell,
And crush'd the Sorceress in her flinty cell.(87)

Sometimes Darwin is moved by more than animation; he is occasionally—though rarely—inspired by an intense feeling. We find this in passages dealing with the terrible, as in Canto IV (‘Of Good and Evil’) of The Temple of Nature, or when he is inspired by hatred of oppression. The following verses on Howard's prison reforms ring with an eloquent admiration of that great man, and are fired with sympathy for the wretched victims of justice.

From realm to realm, with cross or crescent crown'd,
Where'er Mankind and Misery are found,
O'er burning sands, deep waves, or wilds of snow,
Thy Howard journeying seeks the house of woe.
Down many a winding step to dungeon's dank,
Where anguish wails aloud, and fetters clank;
To caves bestrew'd with many a mouldering bone,
And cells, whose echoes only learn to groan;
Where no kind bars a whispering friend disclose,
No sunbeam enters, and no zephyr blows,
He treads, inemulous of fame or wealth,
Profuse of toil, and prodigal of health;
With soft assuasive eloquence expands
Power's rigid heart, and opes his clenching hands;
Leads stern-ey'd Justice to the dark domains,
If not to sever, to relax the chains;
Or guides awaken'd Mercy through the gloom,
And shews the prison, sister to the tomb!—
—Onward he moves!—Disease and Death retire,
And murmuring Demons hate him, and admire.(88)

Perhaps Darwin's most eloquent passage occurs at the beginning of Canto IV of The Temple of Nature where he depicts the ravages to which the creatures of the earth are subjected, rising from the inferior forms that prey upon each other to man who is menaced by war, slavery, insanity, and every conceivable kind of terror and death.

And one great slaughter-house the warring world!

High tragedy is beyond Darwin; when he attempts it he is insufferably grandiose.⁸⁹ But in this passage Darwin, moved by the spirit of science mingled with pity, speaks with persuasive force.

          The wolf, escorted by his milk-drawn dam,
Unknown to mercy, tears the guiltless lamb;
The towering eagle, darting from above,
Unfeeling rends the inoffensive dove;
The lamb and dove on living nature feed,
Crop the young herb, or crush the embryon seed.
Nor spares the loud owl in her dusky flight,
Smit with sweet notes, the minstrel of the night;
Nor spares, enamour'd of his radiant form,
The hungry nightingale the glowing worm;
Who with bright lamp alarms the midnight hour,
Climbs the green stem, and slays the sleeping flower.
          Here ragged Avarice guards with bolted door
His useless treasures from the starving poor;
Loads the lorn hours with misery and care,
And lives a beggar to enrich his heir.
Unthinking crowds thy forms, Imposture, gull,
A Saint in sackcloth, or a Wolf in wool.
While mad with foolish fame, or drunk with power,
Ambition slays his thousands in an hour;
Demoniac Envy scowls with haggard mien,
And blights the bloom of other's joys unseen;
Or wrathful Jealousy invades the grove,
And turns to night meridian beams of Love!
          Here wide o'er earth impetuous waters sweep,
And fields and forests rush into the deep;
Or dread Volcano, with explosion dire
Involves the mountains in a flood of fire;
Or yawning Earth with closing jaws inhumes
Unwarned nations, living in their tombs;
Or Famine seizes with her tiger-paw,
And swallows millions with unsated maw.
          There livid Pestilence in league with Dearth,
Walks forth malignant o'er the shuddering earth,
Her rapid shafts with airs volcanic wings,
Or steeps in putrid vaults her venom'd stings.
Arrests the young in Beauty's vernal bloom,
And bears the innocuous strangers to the tomb!—
          —Ah where can Sympathy reflecting find
One bright idea to console the mind?
One ray of light in this terrene abode
To prove to Man the Goodness of his God?(90)

Darwin may have grave limitations as a poet, but the deeper one reads him the more apparent becomes his solid competence and the less surprising his spurts of genius. He deserves sympathetic attention, not ridicule. Permeating The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature is a deep exhilaration, perhaps unconsciously transmitted into his work. It derives from his delight in the order and unity of nature, and his intense realization of a wonder newly born into the world, the infant science. The generation of poets that followed Darwin may have had just cause for maligning his artistic influence, but in one respect they were blind; they failed to perceive that Darwin was a modern prophet, not inspired perhaps, but nevertheless a seer.

Yet Darwin is essentially the scientist of the laboratory. Even had he the genius of Lucretius—which he did not—his method and material is too patently didactic quite to allow the warmth of De Rerum Natura. None the less, as the first English poet to interpret modern science, Erasmus Darwin deserves distinction.

Notes

1. Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, p. 180.

2. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘The First of the Darwins’, The Bookman lxxix (London, Nov., 1930), 109.

3. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, II, 74.

4. Vide p. 15.

5. European Magazine, I (April, 1782), p. 288.

6. Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, pp. 6-7.

7. See Charles Darwin, Life of Erasmus Darwin, p. 89.

8. Vide p. 10.

9. Seward, Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, pp. 105-106.

10. Op. cit., p. 24.

11. Op cit., p. 127.

12. From family papers at Down House.

13. From family papers at Down House.

14. From Erasmus Darwin's Commonplace Book, p. 164, copied in the hand of Sir Francis Darwin. Cf. the last six lines of The Rape of the Lock.

15. Vide p. 97.

16. In dungeons: Variant reading in Emma Galton's transcript of the poem in letter referred to below, p. 105.

17. From Erasmus Darwin's Commonplace Book, pp. 165-166, copied in the hand of Sir Francis Darwin, the son of Erasmus, who died in 1850.

18. This stanza is either corrupt or carelessly composed. It is certainly anything but clear. A transposition in the third line would clarify it. Thus: ‘The child of chance, fair freighted fleets.’

19. From family papers at Down House.

20. I Sec. XIV, I (p. 148). It will be remembered that Coleridge accused Darwin of having said that he had never read anything in defense of ‘such stuff as religion.’

21. ii, n. l. 122.

22. Add. Note VIII, Conclusion.

23. The Temple of Nature, iv. n. l. 453.

24. iv. n. l. 147.

25. For a catalogue of the occasional poetry, see Appendix [of The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin].

26. Op. cit. pp. 125-131.

27. Letters, XIV, 123-124.

28. The Loves of the Plants, p. 191.

29. The Loves of the Plants, i, 31-38.

30. Vide p. 19.

31. In the Preface, after outlining the system, he says: ‘The Reader who wishes to become further acquainted with this delightful field of Science, is advised to study the works of the Great Master, and is apprized that they are exactly and literally translated into English, by a Society at Lichfield, in four Volumes Octavo’. …

32. Letters, XIV, 437.

33. Op. cit., XV, 110-111.

34. Vide p. 110.

35. p. 67.

36. Feb. 3, 1812.

37. Life, p. 91.

38. The Singing Swan, p. 68.

39. The Economy of Vegetation, i, 413-420.

40. Op. cit., i, 103-114. Of these lines, Walpole wrote: ‘the twelve verses that by miracle describe and comprehend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are in my opinion the most sublime passage in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted.’ (Letters, XV, 110-111.) Absurdly extravagant as Walpole's praise may be, it must be admitted, in justice to Darwin, that the first eight lines of this passage, with their Miltonic tone, have the vitality of true poetry.

41. Op. cit., i, 289-296.

42. A reader of Darwin should by no means skip the verses on the ‘electric kiss’, lines 349-356 of Canto I. A greater gaucherie would be difficult to find in all English poetry.

43. Op. cit., i, 383-388. Further lines are addressed to ‘Immortal Franklin’ in Canto II, line 355 ff.

44. Pearson, Doctor Darwin, pp. 115-116.

45. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, II, 147.

46. The Temple of Nature, i, 295-302.

47. The Temple of Nature, ii, 158.

48. The Loves of the Plants: Interlude II, p. 91. The Economy of Vegetation: Quotation on title page. The Temple of Nature: Canto II, line 261, n.; Canto III, line 181, n.; Canto III, line 246, n. (Same as Interlude II.) Darwin was of course a Latin scholar, but he may also have been familiar with the translation of Lucretius into swinging couplets, made by Thomas Creech in 1714-1715.

    Vide pp. 26, 29-30, 88.

49. De Rerum Natura, iv, 1-25.

50. Chap. XV of Professor Havens' The Influence of Milton On English Poetry gives a valuable account of ‘Technical Treatises’ in poetry.

51. Cyder, i, 248-272.

52. Op. cit., i, 248-272.

53. Cf. The Fleece, Canto III, and The Loves of the Plants, ii, 67-104.

54. The Sugar Cane, Preface.

55. See especially Grainger's account of the trees on the island (i, 33-52); and his description of the weeds (ii, 99-153).

56. Op. cit., i, 132.

57. The Loves of the Plants, iii, 80.

58. Agriculture, iii, 138-164.

59. Op. cit., iii, 190-225.

60. The Poetical Register and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, for 1801, London, 1802, I, 139. The poem is quoted in Anna Seward's Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, pp. 398-399.

61. The English Garden, i, 290-297.

62. Op. cit., i, 348-385.

63. The Task, iii, 534-540.

64. Vide pp. 78-85.

65. Vide pp. 79-80, 84.

66. This, of course, at once brings to mind The Rape of the Lock. Darwin's first interest in Rosicrucianism may have been aroused by Pope. His humorless use of this machinery is in contrast to Pope's gay fancy and mock seriousness.

67. The Economy of Vegetation, pp. vii-viii.

68. Darwin gives a fuller explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, and their appropriateness to his poem in the note to line 137 of Canto I. He seems to have obtained most of his knowledge of these mysteries from Bryant's Mythology, and Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses.

69. Vide p. 131.

70. Creation, v, 53-62.

71. Universal Beauty, vi, 351-360.

72. The Temple of Nature, iv, 369-382. Cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ii, 1002-1006; v, 855-877.

73. Erasmus Darwin, p. 138.

74. See Brandl: Erasmus Darwins Temple of Nature, pp. 20-21.

75. The Temple of Nature, i, 401-408.

76. The Economy of Vegetation, iv, 25-50.

77. Lectures on Shakespeare, p. 67.

78. The Economy of Vegetation, iv, 87-106.

79. Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, p. 303.

80. Op. cit., p. 188. It is interesting to note that Anna Seward expressed a similar opinion two years before The Loves of the Plants was published. Writing to Hayley, Oct. 6, 1787, she says: ‘Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden is contracted for with the booksellers, and we may expect its appearance next spring. Splendid and charming as is this poem, yet, written upon the, I think, mistaken system, that nothing which is not imagery should find a place in poetry, the incessant profusion of ornament will perhaps be a disadvantage to the work in general, as to the pleasure and attention it has, from the genius of its author, so just a right to expect every reader will feel and express. The Botanic Garden is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of the first water; but the eye will be apt to want the interstitial black velvet to give effect to their lustre.’ (Letters, I, 340.)

81. Vol. II, July, 1803.

82. The Loves of the Plants, i, 413-426.

83. Erasmus Darwins Botanic Garden, p. 12.

84. Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, p. 387.

85. Biographia Literaria, p. 10.

86. The Economy of Vegetation, ii, 401-412.

87. Op. cit., iii, 145-156.

88. The Loves of the Plants, ii, 443-472.

89. In The Economy of Vegetation (iii, 413-446) he thus describes the horrible death of a newly-married couple.

    E'en on the day when Youth with Beauty wed,
    The flames surprised them in their nuptial bed;—
    Seen at the opening sash with bosom bare,
    With wringing hands, and dark dishevel'd hair,
    The blushing Beauty with disorder'd charms
    Round her fond lover winds her ivory arms;
    Beat, as they clasp, their throbbing hearts with
              fear,
    And many a kiss is mix'd with many a tear;—
    Ah me! in vain the labouring engines pour
    Round their pale limbs the ineffectual shower!—
    —Then crash'd the floor, while sinking crouds
              retire,
    And Love and Virtue sunk amid the fire!—
    With piercing screams afflicted strangers mourn,
    And their white ashes mingle in their urn.

90. The Temple of Nature, iv, 17-134.

Works Cited

Ashmun, Margaret, The Singing Swan. New Haven, 1931.

Blackmore, Richard, Creation. Cooke's Edition. London, 1797.

Brandl, Leopold, Erasmus Darwins Temple of Nature. Weiner Beiträge, 16, 1902.

———, Erasmus Darwins Botanic Garden. Weiner Beiträge, 30, 1909.

Brooke, Henry, ‘Universal Beauty’, The Poetical Works of, vol. II, Dublin, 1792.

Bryant, Jacob, Mythology, 3 vols. London, 1775.

Coleridge, S. T., Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare, ed. T. Ashie. London, 1902.

———, Biographia Literaria. Everyman Edition.

Cowper, William, Poetical Works. Oxford Edition, London, 1926.

Darwin, Charles, Life of Erasmus Darwin. London, 1879.

Dodsley, Robert, Agriculture. Cooke's Edition. London, 1799.

Dyer, John, ‘The Fleece’, Poems by. London, 1761.

Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, Memoirs, 2 vols. bound in one. Boston, 1821.

European Magazine, Vol. 1. (April, 1782). Anecdotes of Anna Seward's life.

Grainger, James, ‘The Sugar Cane’. British Poets. ed. Robert Anderson, vol. X. London, 1795.

Havens, R. D., The Influence of Milton on English Poetry. Cambridge, Mass., 1922.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. Loeb Classical Library. London, 1928.

Mason, William, ‘The English Garden’. The Works of, vol. I. London, 1811.

Pearson, Hesketh, Doctor Darwin. London, 1930.

Philips, John, ‘Cyder’. Poems of. Percy Reprints No. 10. Oxford, 1927.

Seward, Anna, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin. London, 1804. Letters, 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1811.

Walpole, Horace, Letters. ed. Mrs. Paget Toynbee, vols. XIV & XV. Oxford, 1903-1905.

Warburton, William, The Divine Legation of Moses. London, vol. I, 1755, vol. II, 1742.