(T)hat our future course , all plain to sight, was downwards,with the current of that stream.../ For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds/ We questioned him again, and yet again/But every word that from the peasant's lips/ Came in reply, translated by our feelings/ Ended in this,-that we had crossed the Alps./ Imagination-here the Power so called/ Through sad incompetence of human speech/That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss/ Like an unfathered vapour that unwraps/ At once, some lonely traveller.(lines 584-596, William Wordsworth, The Prelude: Book Sixth.).
Wordsworth, in this particular passage, attempts to articulate the astonishment one feels as they are confronted with something more than a symbolic landscape; he attempts to show that neither one's mind nor intellect is capable of controlling nature and that his realisation of the accomplishment of crossing the Alps serves to reaffirms to the intellect that there is indeed a larger world out there which
inevitably leads one to one's imagination; this sense of man's placement within a larger scheme of nature is no longer underpinned by his sense of reason but rather his imaginative capabilities. Romanticism itself has been described as 'emotional naturalism'as well as 'a health-restoring revival of the instinctual life'as a response to the eighteenth century attempts to place most within the 'united names of reason and society'.1 John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral
From the Meadows(1831) offers an instinctual, if nostalgic, view of a relatively common sight in rural England. Through a brief thematic and technical exploration into the painting, we are able to see that Constable shows us a considerably unconventional interpretation of a landscape.
Constable shows us a rather simple and idyllic portrayal of an agricultural labourer crossing a country stream with his cart which is set against the image of Salisbury Cathedral under a rainbow. Rather than blatantly idealising and bettering the image with reference to the predominant landscape conventions of his time, such as the older Claudian conventions or the prescribed Burkean ideals of the sublime, Constable allows his instinct rather than reason to dominate his interpretation. This instinct may very well have been set in response to the plight of the agricultural labourer; following the wars with France, Britain's farmers were facing economic danger as high rents on long leases taken out before the wars were proving difficult and the protectionist Corn Laws, a set of laws that forbade the import of foreign grain until the price of home grown reached 80s per quarter, were
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