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Wild Romanticism

Wild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions

of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence
of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea.
This volume brings together the work of twelve scholars, who examine
representations of wildness in canonical texts such as Frankenstein, Nort-
hanger Abbey, “Kubla Khan,” “Expostulation and Reply,” and Childe
Harold´s Pilgrimage, as well as lesser-known works by Radcliffe, Clare,
Hölderlin, P.B. Shelley, and Hogg. Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-
period authors with a way of thinking about nature that resists instrumental-
ization and anthropocentricism, but writing about wilderness also engaged
them in debates about the sublime and picturesque as aesthetic categories,
about gender and the cultivation of independence as natural, and about the
ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal enclosure.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Romanti-
cism, environmental literature, environmental history, and the environmen-
tal humanities more broadly.

Markus Poetzsch is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier Uni-

versity, where he specializes in British Romantic literature and ecocriticism.
He is the author of Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotid-
ian Sublime and has published essays on John Clare, William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Henry David Thoreau.
His research considers intersecting themes, such as aesthetics and landscape
gardening, pedestrianism and loco-description, anthropocentrism and or-
nithology, poetics, and ethics.

Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT—The Arctic Uni-

versity of Norway. Her books include Phenomenology and the Broken Body
(co-ed. 2019), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Literature by
the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013), and Intersec-
tions in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed. 2010). She has published essays
on romanticism, phenomenology, education, and the role of the reader. Her
current project discusses acts of reading in light of recent theorizations of
complicity.
“Wild Romanticism is an innovative and highly original collection of essays
that makes a substantial and persuasive contribution to the discipline of
environmental humanities. The topic of wilderness during the Romantic
period is an important and largely unexplored area of scholarship, one that
will be of compelling interest to scholars of British and European literature
and environmental history. This book will appeal to a broad range of read-
ers due to its bold originality and its relevance to contemporary environ-
mental concerns.”
— James C. McKusick, University of Missouri-­Kansas
City, author of Green Writing: Romanticism and
Ecology and co-editor of Literature and Nature: Four
Centuries of Nature Writing.
Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media
Series editor: Thomas Bristow

The urgency of the next great extinction impels us to evaluate environmental

crises as sociogenic. Critiques of culture have a lot to contribute to the en-
deavour to remedy crises of culture, drawing from scientific knowledge but
adding to it arguments about agency, community, language, technology and
artistic expression. This series aims to bring to consciousness potentialities
that have emerged within a distinct historical situation and to underscore
our actions as emergent within a complex dialectic among the living world.
It is our understanding that studies in literature, culture and media can
add depth and sensitivity to the way we frame crises; clarifying how culture
is pervasive and integral to human and non-human lives as it is the medium
of lived experience. We seek exciting studies of more-than-human entangle-
ments and impersonal ontological infrastructures, slow and public media,
and the structuring of interpretation. We seek interdisciplinary frameworks
for considering solutions to crises, addressing ambiguous and protracted
states such as solastalgia, anthropocene anxiety, and climate grief and de-
nialism. We seek scholars who are thinking through decolonization and
epistemic justice for our environmental futures. We seek sensitivity to itera-
bility, exchange and interpretation as wrought, performative acts.
Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media provides accessi-
ble material to broad audiences, including academic monographs and an-
thologies, fictocriticism and studies of creative practices. We invite you to
contribute to innovative scholarship and interdisciplinary inquiries into the
interactive production of meaning sensitive to the affective circuits we move
through as experiencing beings.

Mediating Nature
The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy
Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey

Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt

Adapt, Interpret, Mutate
Timothy Ryan Day

Wild Romanticism
Edited by Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke

For further information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Routledge-Environmental-Literature-Culture-and-Media/
book-series/RELCM
Wild Romanticism

Edited by
Markus Poetzsch and
Cassandra Falke
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Markus Poetzsch and
Cassandra Falke individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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Contents

List of figures ix
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1
CA S SA N DR A FA L K E A N D M A R KUS P OE T Z S C H

1 Weakness and wildness in Wordsworth’s “The Brothers” 15

E M M A M A S ON

2 Wild freedom and careful wandering in the poetry of William

Wordsworth and John Clare 28
SU E E DN E Y

3 Plumbing the depths of wildness: from the picturesque to

John Clare 43
M A R KUS P OE T Z S C H

4 Savage, holy, enchanted: Coleridge in concert with the wild 59

G R E G ORY L E A DBE T T E R

5 Human grapes in the wine-presses: vegetable life and the

violence of cultivation in Blake’s Milton 74
T R I S TA N N E C ON NOL LY

6 Wild plants and wild passions in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems

for Jane Williams 91
C I A N DU F F Y
viii Contents
7 Wilding Europe and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 110
CA S SA N DR A FA L K E

8 Hölderlin, Heidegger, and hyperobjects 127

W I L L I A M DAV I S

9 “Almost Wild”: Jane Austen’s dirtiest of heroines 144

C OL I N CA R M A N

10 “Wild above rule or art”: volcanic luxuriance, subterranean

terror, and the nature of gender in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian
Romance 158
JA M E S L E S SL I E

11 “A strange unearthly climate”: James Hogg’s tale of the

Arctic wild 173
ROBE RT W. R I X

12 “Vast and irregular plains of ice”: wilderness as smooth

space in Frankenstein 189
M I R K A HOROVÁ

Index 205
Figures

5.1 Plate 36, Copy B (ca. 1811), Milton a Poem by William

Blake, 54041, The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California (Blake Archive) 81
6.1 “Mimosa Grandiflora” from Robert John Thornton,
Temple of Flora (1812); reproduced by kind permission of
The Cleveland Art Museum (Wikimedia Commons) 100
6.2 “A Group of Stapelias” from Robert John Thornton,
Temple of Flora (1812); reproduced by kind permission of
The Getty Research Institute (Hathi Trust) 106
11.1 “Das Eismeer” (1823–1824) by Caspar David Friedrich;
Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg (Wikimedia Commons) 178
11.2 “Man Proposes, God Disposes” (1864) by Edwin
Landseer; reproduced by kind permission of Royal
Holloway, University of London 182
Contributors

Colin Carman is Assistant Professor of English at Colorado Mesa University

in Grand Junction, Colorado, and author of The Radical Ecology of the
Shelleys: Eros and Environment (Routledge Books, 2019). A former fellow
at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, he has contributed
to three book collections: Lacan and Romanticism, Romantic Ecocriti-
cism: Origins and Legacies, and The Brokeback Book. His articles, rang-
ing from the Shelleys and Walter Scott to the films of Werner Herzog and
Terrence Malick, have appeared in such journals as ISLE, European Ro-
mantic Review, GLQ, Studies in Scottish Literature, and Horror Studies.
Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor in the English Department at St.
Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She is the author of
William Blake and the Body (2002), along with several articles on Blake,
on Erasmus Darwin, and on British Romantic literature in relation to
science and medicine, gender and sexuality, and religion. She has edited
a number of essay collections, most recently Beastly Blake (2018), with
Helen P. Bruder, and British Romanticism in European Perspective, with
Steve Clark (2015).
William Davis is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies
at Colorado College and works on intersections between philosophy and
literature, comparative British and German Romanticisms, and literary
theory. He is the author of Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy
of Nature (2018). His articles on German and British Romanticism, often
viewed in relation to German Idealism, have appeared in journals such
as Goethe Yearbook, Germanic Review, German Quarterly, European Ro-
mantic Review, Prisms, and The Wordsworth Circle. He is currently work-
ing on a project on material culture and the invention of the “classical” in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Cian Duffy is Professor and Chair of English literature at Lund Univer-
sity, Sweden. He has published monographs, editions, and articles deal-
ing with various aspects of the intellectual life and cultural history of
Europe during the Romantic period. Particular focal points have been
 Contributors xi
representations of landscape and the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Recent
work includes the collection Romantic Norths: Anglo Nordic Exchanges,
1770–1842 (Palgrave, 2017) and the edition Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected
Poems and Prose (ed. with Jack Donovan; Penguin, 2018).
Sue Edney is a Senior Associate at Bristol University, specializing in Ro-
mantic and Victorian poetry, language, and ecocriticism. She has pub-
lished on dialect, identity and place, William Barnes, Tennyson, Philip
Henry Gosse, Gothic sea-anemones, and environmental justice, in addi-
tion to book reviews. She is co-editing two essay collections: Reworking
Georgic, with Tess Somervell, and Hannah More in Context, with Kerri
Andrews. She is Reviews Editor for Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriti-
cism, the journal for ASLE-UKI, and the International Ecolinguistics
Association steering committee’s ecocriticism representative. Her essay
collection EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms,
Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers (MUP) is forthcoming November 2020.
Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT—The Arctic Uni-
versity of Norway. Her books include Phenomenology and the Broken
Body (co-ed. 2019), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Lit-
erature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013),
and Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed. 2010). She has
published essays on romanticism, phenomenology, education, and the
role of the reader. Her current project discusses acts of reading in light of
recent theorizations of complicity.
Mirka Horová is Senior Lecturer in English at Charles University and Ed-
itor of The Byron Journal. She has written widely on Byron, including
chapters on heroic transformation (Routledge, 2016), Italian dramas
(MUP, 2017), Lucretius (CSP, 2018), the Satanic School (CUP, 2019), and
an article on swimming (2019). She has edited several books and special
journal issues. From 2013–19, she co-organized the international New-
stead Abbey Byron conference. Her research interests include Romantic
literature and play theory. This work was supported by the European
Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as
Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.
02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
Gregory Leadbetter is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.
His research focusses on Romantic poetry and thought, and the tradi-
tions to which these relate, together with the history and practice of po-
etry more generally. His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012.
His poetry collections include Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), The
Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and the pamphlet The Body in the Well
(HappenStance Press, 2007).
xii Contributors
James Lesslie was awarded a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of
London, in April 2020 for his thesis “British Women Writers and the Cul-
ture of Wild Nature: 1781–1815.” His research interests include women’s
writing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain—par-
ticularly representations of the natural world and their interconnections
with revolutionary-era political and ideological debates—as well as his-
toriography, travel writing, Gothic literature, and regional cultures and
identities in Britain during the long eighteenth century.
Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies
at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include Reading the
Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2015)
and Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press,
2018). She is series editor of Bloomsbury’s monograph series, New Di-
rections in Religion and Literature, with Mark Knight, with whom she
is currently writing Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theol-
ogies at Work.
Markus Poetzsch is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier Uni-
versity, where he specializes in British Romantic literature and ecocriti-
cism. He is the author of Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s
Quotidian Sublime and has published essays on John Clare, William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Henry
David Thoreau. His research considers intersecting themes, such as aes-
thetics and landscape gardening, pedestrianism and loco-description,
anthropocentrism and ornithology, poetics, and ethics.
Robert W. Rix is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen.
He has published widely in several areas relating to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: politics, religion, language, nationalism, Nordic
antiquarianism, and print culture/book history. In a number of arti-
cles and a monograph, Rix has focussed on William Blake and the re-
ligious radicalism of the 1790s. He has also written on medieval ideas
and manuscript culture in The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination:
­ egend, and Literature (2014). Rix’s forthcoming book exam-
­Ethnicity, L
ines the exploration and representation of Greenland in Western culture
and ­literary works.
Acknowledgements

In normal times, a volume such as this depends on the collective inspiration,

synergy, diligence, patience, generosity, and goodwill of its contributors,
without whose application there can be no success. Against the backdrop
of COVID-19, when most of the writing and editing took place, all of these
admirable qualities have had to be quickened and intensified—and a few
more virtues thrown into the mix! Some of our contributors dealt with per-
sonal and family illness; some worked in the midst of a frantic transition
from in-class to online teaching; some scrambled to find texts and sources
in a time of shuttered libraries; some (okay, most) struggled with periods of
profound stress, isolation, and uncertainty. And yet somehow, despite the
odds, the work was completed on time and in a manner consistent with our
hopes. We thank you.
Our gratitude must also go to the three anonymous reviewers on whose
advice Routledge sped this book to print. We are indebted to you for your
astute commentaries, helpful suggestions, and enthusiastic support. In like
manner, we thank our Routledge team—Oindrila Bose, Rebecca Brennan,
and Tom Bristow—for their belief in the project and their invaluable assis-
tance throughout the planning and production phases.
Cassandra Falke would like to thank her husband, Damon, whose sup-
port in a period of illness made work on this book possible, and her two
sons, Charlie and Sebastian. I am thankful for our years of exploring the
wild together. This volume grew out of the Wild Romanticism conference in
Tromsø, Norway, in 2018. Thanks are due to UiT for their support of that
event and to conference participants for their inspiring presentations and
spirit of adventure.
Markus Poetzsch would like to thank his wife, Jeni, and his sons, Sam
and Gabriel, for those “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and
of love,” against which even a pandemic cannot prevail.
Introduction
Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch

The progressive reinvention of wilderness as something to be treasured—

‘unspoiled nature’—paralleled the increasing urbanization and industriali-
zation of Western society . . . Taking the lead in articulating and promoting
this new view of wilderness was a group of Romantic writers.
(Charles Warren, “Wildness,” International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography 281–282)

To the extent that wilderness spaces and the laws that created them persist,
we are still living, literally, within the Romantic period.
(Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature 114)

Although Romanticism frequently appears in Wilderness Studies, and wil-

derness appears in studies of Romanticism, the relationship between the
two is often assumed rather than directly examined. Romanticism is related
to certain concepts of wilderness both historically and as a trans-historical
phenomenon of perception. The association between Romanticism and
wilderness seems like a matter of history, as geographer Charles Warren
frames it in the quote above. Alongside the industrial revolution, a group
of Romantic writers—“urban-based literary” types—perceived the wild as
an “appealing other” that could summon forth some element of selfhood
kept hidden in the throng of cities, and along with “proto-conservationists,”
“landscape artists and photographers,” this group propagated a concept of
wilderness that was anti-urban, and anti-industry, something that could be
conserved as an act of resistance to modernization (281–282). In this view,
Romanticism is important to our understanding of wilderness as a point of
origin for a wilderness concept that has led to policies protecting of specific
wild spaces, like national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Timothy Morton,
in contrast, sees wilderness as perpetuating a certain form of Romantic
subjectivity. Wilderness relies on “social and psychological” distance. The
Romantic subject portrays him- or herself as simultaneously within a per-
ceptual field characterized by distance and at the edge of that perceptual
2 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
field observing the self—the overcoated, stick-toting figure of Caspar Da-
vid Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea
of Fog) and the painter admiring him all in one. Wilderness, according to
Morton, only becomes recognizable as such when one is outside of it. In this
view, wilderness and Romanticism are so intimately related that the one
perpetuates the other.
Wild Romanticism approaches the relationship between wilderness and
Romanticism both as a matter of history and as a matter of conceptual
co-creation, while challenging the idea that the wild is something history
has moved beyond, or which persists in the present only as nostalgia. The
collection finds the wild to be an actively renewing force that is associated
with distance because of its resistance to human control, not because it is
spatially far away or temporally left behind. The “wild” conjures up no-
tions of what is culturally, politically, and cognitively unassimilable. Wild
Romanticism explores wildness as a trait that Romantic authors yearned
towards and directed attention to, a trait that they attributed to spaces we
would still be likely to call “wilderness,” but that they also found close to
home. For Romantic authors, “wild” describes internal states (wild imagi-
nation) and external manifestations (wild eyes). Plants, people, animals, and
landforms can all be wild. The wild goes in and out of houses, riding along
in hair and glances, and yet resists any form of domestication. The nuance
and adaptability of Romantic concepts of wildness have been lost, some-
what ironically, in the broad recognition of Romanticism’s importance to
later conceptions of wilderness.

Etymologies of the wild

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meanings of “wilder-
ness” and its cognate “bewilder” changed. “Bewilder” came to be associ-
ated with internal states and “wilderness” with external spaces. This is due,
to a large extent, to what Jedediah Purdy calls “a new public language of
wilderness” that developed in the mid-twentieth century (190). The “Wilder-
ness Movement” began in the US in the 1920s as conservationists became
divided over the purpose of national parks. One group advocated a con-
sumer model of parks usage that focussed on tourists’ access to beautiful
scenery and outdoor recreation, while another focussed on the preservation
of land unaltered by human interference. By 1964, the Wilderness Preser-
vation Act defined such land as “wilderness.” The wild was an “area where
the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man
himself is a visitor who does not remain” (US DoJ). This concept of the
wild as “undisturbed by human activity” has secured such a firm place in
international law (IUCN) and cultural parlance that it is difficult to recover
the flexibility and interrelatedness that wild/wildness/wilderness retained
in the Romantic period. In the early nineteenth century, the wild was not
exclusively, or even primarily, defined based on its separation from human
 Introduction 3
activity. John Keats’s work exemplifies this well. Noah Comet’s concord-
ance of his work shows that Keats uses the term “wild” seventy-one times in
his collected works, twenty-two times in Endymion alone. Keats describes
explorers’ “wild surmises” (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” line
13), and a young man’s “wild uncertainty” (Endymion II: line 273). The act
of “conjecturing” can be “wild” (Endymion III: line 556), but so can a “for-
est nook” (Endymion II: line 890). The first three of these examples refer
to individual or communal acts of thought as wild, suggesting that like a
forest nook, a thought can appear that was unlooked for, wondrous, and po-
tentially dangerous, without prior intention or after-the-fact subsumption
into existing categories. “Wild” thoughts include surmise, uncertainty, and
conjecture, and therefore retain some of the flexibility Keats associates with
creative, negatively capable thinking.
“Bewilder” is a related term, which etymologists think is a back forma-
tion derived from wilderness (Hoad). According to Google’s NGram viewer,
the word reached its peak of popularity exactly during the Romantic pe-
riod, between 1776 and 1832. Seventeenth-century uses of the term retain
the theological weight of the wilderness being the space outside the Garden
of Eden, as in John Scott’s The Christian Life, which despairs of humanity
as “almost universally lost and bewildered” (3: 101), but by the Romantic
period, postlapsarian associations had faded. The London Encyclopedia of
1829 defines “bewilder” as “to lose in pathless places; to confound for want
of a plain road; to perplex; to entangle; to puzzle.” Like its cognate “wild,”
the term “bewilder” mediates internal and external states, but it emphasizes
in both cases an enforced directionlessness. Turning to Keats again, we find
“bewildered shepherds” hoping to regain their path quite literally (Endy-
mion 1: line 269), but also a “brain bewilder’d” (“To My Brother George”
line 2). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the association be-
tween bewilderment and literal pathlessness became obscure after the mid-
nineteenth century, but for Romantic-period authors, the experience of wan-
dering in physically uncharted space seems to have lingered in the experi-
ence of psychological bewilderment. This residue of literal pathlessness hints
at crucial differences between the early nineteenth and early twenty-first
centuries—many people today go years at a time without ever being lost in
pathless woods, due to the predominance of urban living and technologies
like cell phones and GPS tracking. The early nineteenth-century use of “be-
wilder” also hints at an element of Romantic wildness that gets overlooked
if we link “wild” too readily to aesthetics of sublimity or distance. The vital-
ity of the metaphor behind “bewildered” implies that being literally wilded
or wildered was something everyone had experienced, not only explorers or
long-trekking poets.
Twentieth-century ideological battles over what defines wilderness
have led to the term being associated with a nature/culture divide that
no longer seems tenable. Consequently, Warren anticipates twenty-first-
century discussions of ecology turning increasingly to “wildness” instead
4 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
of “wilderness” (288). Wild Romanticism acknowledges, even celebrates,
the important role that Romantic authors had in articulating ideas that be-
came central for wilderness conservation, but in choosing the more dynamic
“wild” over “wilderness” for our title, we want to reclaim some of the term’s
nineteenth-century slipperiness and to highlight the resonances between
the experience of existential or cognitive be-wilderment and the embodied
experience of being directionless, out of control. Morton seems surprised
that the “space of [John Clare’s] village, even if it was indeed feudal, was
always already criss-crossed with otherness” (200). He writes that Clare’s
poem “I Am” is “the stunning moment at which this otherness is perceived
as intrinsic to the self” and that in this same moment “we have lost nature,
but gained ecology” (200). Morton associates “nature” with a conceptual
covering up and homogenizing of otherness, a projection of such otherness
away from the self. “Ecology,” in his usage, bespeaks a willingness to relin-
quish the desire for conceptual mastery and a recognition that human selves
exist within and contribute to global and local environments that include
non-human species, landforms, and geologic processes. Clare becomes eco-
logical when he realizes that an unnameable otherness pervades every place,
even those that seem most familiar. Ecology knows that it does not know;
nature names and claims. But in rejecting nature in favour of ecology, Mor-
ton is looking for something the wild seems to have already provided for
Romantic-period authors, a way of marking the unknowable that originates
from outside human subjectivity and remains resistant to it even when we
experience it within our own body or consciousness.

The romantic wild

Within Romantic ecocriticism, by which we mean both ecocriticism influ-
enced by Romantic-period ideas and a subset of that ecocriticism devoted to
Romantic-period literature, there has been a tendency to trouble the divi-
sions between nature and culture, human and non-human, the country and
the city. The focus on these conceptual dichotomies has led contemporary
scholars to overlook wildness, which many Romantic-period authors use
to mediate these divisions. This collection seeks to fill a gap in Roman-
tic scholarship by consolidating thinking about Romantic conceptions of
the wild, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic,
and ecological idea. This gap is particularly apparent in studies of Anglo-
European Romanticism. As Phillip and April Vannini point out, “most
volumes on wilderness are in one way or another about the US and about
American ideas, histories, values and perspectives of wilderness” (22).
Important theorizations of Romantic ecology by scholars such as Jona-
than Bate, Karl Kroeber, Kate Rigby, and Timothy Morton, which have
focussed on Britain and Europe, have not made wildness or wilderness a
central focus of their work in the way that scholars of nineteenth-century
America have. Yet as James McKusick points out, for Anglo-European
 Introduction 5
Romantic authors, the “natural world is pervaded by revolutionary ener-
gies” that express themselves in what is unruly, ungovernable, and unfath-
omable (“Introduction” para. 4).
Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-period authors with a way of
thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentri-
cism while also engaging them in debates about the sublime and picturesque
as aesthetic categories, about gender and the cultivation of independence as
natural, and about the ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal
enclosure. Scholars included here examine spaces like the Arctic, which
still sometimes functions metonymically as the boundary of human power,
but they also discuss sites where wildness shows up unexpectedly, like Wil-
liam Blake’s garden and Jane Austen’s parlours. They deepen knowledge
about authors who appear frequently in Romantic ecocriticism, such as
William Wordsworth and John Clare, but also explore work by Ann Rad-
cliffe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and James Hogg, whose writings about the wild
have been neglected. Also included are Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Col-
eridge, who used the term “wild” more freely than most, but who do not
appear frequently in ecocritical scholarship. There is still more work to do
to expand knowledge about nineteenth-century conceptions of the wild,
particularly in European Romanticism, but we have tried to curate the col-
lection to reflect diverse geographies and authors. The collection covers
wild spaces from Sicily to Greenland, from Blake’s back garden to Mary
Shelley’s fields of ice.
Taken together, the essays here reveal the Romantic wild to be more
pervasive than previously imagined. The wild is characterized in terms of
otherness and uncontrollability without necessarily being projected into a
distant or uninhabited place. Percy Shelley writes famously about the steep-
sided precipices of Mont Blanc, but the wild also pervades his love poems
to Jane Williams. The illicit lover does not picture himself in relation to a
sublime edifice, but to wilting flowers and suffering pumpkin plants. The
wild and numinous tone that pervades landscape descriptions in “Kubla
Khan” recurs throughout Coleridge’s writing in references to his own
armchair-thinking processes as “wild,” particularly when he tries to push
his mind beyond what has been thought before. The wild, for authors ex-
amined here, is not something to be conquered or mapped, but something
that we exist within and among. The wild that Hogg’s character Allan Gor-
don discovers in Greenland, for example, surrounds a small village and in-
vades the village in the form of polar bears. The humans in the story are
not portrayed as masters in the land they inhabit, but rather exist precar-
iously alongside other animals struggling for survival. Clare, whose fenny
home landscape had been worked and reworked, writes of the plenitude of
wild life in the fields, rather than longing for some imagined, never inhab-
ited wild. Positioning himself below the birds, among their nests, within a
copse, beside a mouse, he repeatedly testifies to the surprising activities and
non-human intentionality of species around him.
6 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
A paragraph from Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes reveals the perva-
siveness and flexibility of “wild” terminology. Wordsworth is pronouncing
upon the proper way of decorating houses (“dust colour” is acceptable,
but white or yellow is not; “foreign” fauna may only be grown near the
door), but the problem of larch plantations, which he discusses at some
length, leads him to the topic of artificial versus natural tree and shrub
propagation (para. 85–86). He suggests that the space between a house
and a forest be filled with shrubs and fruit trees found in the woods, and
here “wild” and “wilding” serve as species markers to distinguish “the
wild-rose,” “the wilding, black cherry tree,” and the “wild cluster-cherry”
or hackberry from their domesticated cousins. These plants retain a wild
identity although they survive transplantation. Wordsworth therefore
deems them appropriate to mediate domesticated and non-domesticated
spaces. Wildness here is a continuum that a human designer can respond
to and position him or herself within, but that it would be foolish to try to
control or fully emulate. Later in the paragraph, Wordsworth pairs “wild”
and “bewildered” in a way that reveals the concept’s ambiguity. He con-
trasts a “wild wood,” admirable in its naturalness, with a cultivated space
“where we have the whole contents of the nurseryman’s catalogue jum-
bled together—colour at war with colour, and form with form.” There, in
the designed portion of the property, he finds “among the most peaceful
subjects of Nature’s kingdom, everywhere discord, distraction, and bewil-
derment!” (para. 87). The “peaceful subjects” seem to be the trees and
shrubs themselves, and the source of bewilderment among them the “ar-
tificial planter,” a human (para. 88). Everything in this paragraph seems
to have agency. Forcibly juxtaposed colours war with one another, while
plants crave peace. Cherry trees wild (a verb), and humans bewilder. Hu-
mans are decentred but not absent in this consideration of what is wild and
what wilds. They become a wilding or bewildering force that threatens the
peaceful tree subjects in something of the same way Hogg’s polar bears
threaten human Greenlanders.
Wordsworth’s emphasis is not on the wild as something beyond a bound-
ary of human habitation, but beyond human domination. The enclosures
of small farmers produce “wild graces” (para. 93), and cottages added to
over time possess “wildness and beauty” (para. 66). “Artificial planters” re-
veal bad taste in behaving as though the growth of trees and production
of colour were within their control. In contrast, on the mountainside, no
force dominates another. The forces of trees protecting one another are bal-
anced by the forces of soil deterioration and wind. Humans would do better,
Wordsworth suggests, to receive and interpret the direction of multiple nat-
ural forces, to take a responsive rather than a controlling role, much as the
trees themselves do. The first settlers, Wordsworth imagines, followed with
their ploughs: “the veins of richer, dryer, or less stony soil; and thus it has
shaped out an intermixture of wood and lawn, with a grace and wildness
 Introduction 7
which it would have been impossible for the hand of studied art to produce”
(para. 47). In all these instances there is an emphasis on process and passive
reception of forces beyond human agency.
Ashton Nichols connects “the Romantic idea of wilderness” to the image
of “a space so vast that the edges of it can hardly be conceived, as a mys-
terious wildness with which humans have almost nothing to do” (xvi), but
looking at the Guide to the Lakes, we find something very different. Wild-
ness is mysterious in small as well as large manifestations. The wild cannot
be conceived, but not because humans have nothing to do with it. Rather,
the wild marks the boundary of human control, both physically and concep-
tually. One can work with the wild—steering a plough along a seam of more
yielding ground or moving a wild rose into the garden—and if the wildness
of the rose or the dirt resists manipulation enough, then we can trace the
boundary of where the wild begins, but the human role in this process is
allowing wildness to manifest itself, not conceptually subsuming it.

External geographies
The Romantic Wild, as this volume makes clear, has many faces (and per-
haps as many masks), yet its primary orientation is towards what is other,
what lies outside the authority and security of the egoic subject and man-
ifests itself in “things we have not created ourselves” (McKusick 10). For
Romantic-era writers, wild “things” were almost invariably natural things
and their thingliness was distributed across spaces of diverse configura-
tion, varying scope, and inevitable alteration, but all of them related by the
workings of a power that resists regulation. The common names for these
spaces, readily evident in the titles of travel literature, poetry, fiction, and
aesthetic treatises of the period, are of course familiar to us still and reveal
something about the disciplines brought to bear on their description and the
tactics deployed in their management: spot, scene, prospect, land, island,
landscape, topography, region, county, country, world. Authors who evoked
these terms, whose work we now divide tidily by genre or discipline, were all
doing a form of geography, literally a writing of the earth. Yet in the eight-
eenth century this academic discipline—still in its “‘pre-critical’ stage of de-
velopment” (Mayhew 385)—directed its enquiries rather far afield and thus
often passed over the smaller or more local manifestations of wild space,
and this tendency to overlook the local has persisted in geographical stud-
ies of wildness until quite recently. As Robert Mayhew points out, physical
geography in the Romantic period was “centred on acquiring knowledge
about the situation of places in terms of their longitude and latitude” (390).
Samuel Johnson accordingly establishes the geographer’s proper domain,
in a definition drawn from the tracts of Isaac Watts, as “the knowledge of
the circles of the earthly globe, and the situation of the various parts of the
earth.” In such a geography there is no place for the heaths and woods of
8 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
Helpston, the arbour at Nether Stowey, the garden plots of Dove Cottage or,
alternately, Lambeth, the plum-tree at Wentworth Place, or the upper-floor
apartment of potted plants at Tre Palazzi di Chiesa.
And even the larger expanses of geographic space to which Johnson’s
definition confidently alludes were, as Michael Wiley reminds us, but im-
precisely and inadequately mapped. “Through the end of the eighteenth
century, geographers did not know the full exterior boundaries of even the
world’s major land masses—areas seemingly accessible to the scientific eye”
(11). Selecting one notable example, Wiley points out that Romantic-era car-
tographers did not conceive that Greenland is separate from North America.
And even where apparently familiar and well-travelled regions such as the
West Indies were concerned, many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
maps betray an abundance of “empty spaces” (Wiley 11) outside of the Brit-
ish colonies themselves. Thus, alongside the well-established and exhaus-
tively documented narrative of European colonization in this period—with
“the known world,” as Katherine Turner avers, “expand[ing] at a prodigious
rate” (22) and an astonishing twenty-six per cent of the global population
under British rule by 1820 (Leask 273)—runs the thread of another more
complicated story about the limits and lacunae of geographic knowledge,
what it seizes but fails to grasp.
The tension between the known world and one that operates at the mar-
gins or wholly outside the structures of Anglo-European epistemology is
important to the purpose of this volume because “empty spaces” have his-
torically (and indeed still today) been most readily populated by our notions
of the wild. That is where the energy of wildness runs first, into the breaches
of cartographic certainty, into the lapses of colonial order and control, into
the recesses of the unknown. Romantic writers, as we will suggest, also
of course apprehended and encountered wildness in more domesticated
spaces, even indeed in cities—what Gavin Van Horn designates as “the rel-
ative wild” (4)—but in contemplating the macro-geography of this period,
one cannot simply pass over the fact that their “known world,” the prod-
uct of travel and speculation, literature and lived experience, surveys and
maps, was significantly different and inarguably more circumscribed than
our own. This is a circumstance that contemporary debates over the mean-
ing or validity of wild spaces, especially those freighted with the contested
designation of “wilderness,” consistently overlook. Indeed, the constructiv-
ist objections that have been raised in regard to the geographic reality or
given-ness of wilderness as a pristine landscape remote from the claims and
incursions of humanity tend to adopt a selective and often narrow histori-
cism to which is sutured, as David Kidner argues, “a delusory anthropocen-
tric arrogance” (13) that overestimates the human role in shaping the world
of nature. William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground (1996), arguably the ur-text
of the modern constructivist position, renders not only wilderness but na-
ture itself as “a profoundly human construction” (“Introduction” 25). What
he means of course is not to deny the reality, geographic or otherwise, of our
 Introduction 9
physical environment but rather to interrogate certain symbolic accretions
to place—to “empty space,” we might say—that have over time filled that
emptiness “with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created
and idealized it” (“Trouble with Wilderness” 73). Tellingly, in his historical
survey of biblical, Romantic, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American
conceptions of wilderness—these being the only reference points deemed
relevant—Cronon makes no attempt to distinguish the geographic realities
or “known worlds” of these disparate cultures, peoples, and periods.
More recent forays into the constructivist debate have acknowledged that
the modern world of wilderness spoliation and erasure—if that is indeed
our only reality now—is not a secure lens through which to study the past.
Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
(2013), for example, though it also dispenses with “our Romantic notion of
untrammeled wilderness” (2) and dallies (as its subtitle suggests) with “An-
thropocene boosterism” (Butler xi), concedes as a necessary foundation for
analysis that “We have lost a lot of nature in the past three hundred years”
(1). To put it simply, Romantic-era writers and travellers had more reason to
have faith not only in the construct but also in “the actuality of wilderness”
(Nash, “Wild World” 186, emphasis added) than many people have today.
In making this claim, however, we do not deny that their representations
of wilderness were often, like our own, given to fanciful reconstruction or
outright invention. As Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe suggest, the
focus of writers in this era is on “actual locations . . . imaginatively con-
ceived” (3). This distinction is important because it allows us to examine
not only the “empty spaces” of the Romantic geographic imaginary but
also, at the same time, the nature of its “known world” and how it made
space for wild space.
A return to Johnson’s definition of geography reveals the easy slippage
from an outward-looking, ostensibly fact-based and scientifically corrob-
orated body of knowledge (e.g. cartography) to something rather more in-
trospective, contingent, and politicized. As he notes, “in the largest sense
of all, [geography] extends to the various customs, habits, and governments
of nations.” This mapping of what we now designate as human geography
or anthropogeography onto the cartographer’s parchment is precisely what
accounts for the prominence of colonial settlements and their surrounding
“empty spaces” on Romantic-era maps of the West Indies. Not only were
maps of the “known world” ideologically inflected (and indeed they still
are, as the differences between the Mercator and Gall-Peters projections
reveal), but so were the travel narratives that served to animate wild as well
as cultivated space for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. These
texts, as Nigel Leask points out, had tremendous influence on the mental
geography of their readers, providing both rural and metropolitan audi-
ences “with their knowledge of the ‘wider world’” (272). Yet this knowledge
was by no means a stable or uniform resource and, as such, neither were
Anglo-European impressions of the “wider world.” The work of Julia Kuehn
10 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
and Paul Smethurst, for example, foregrounds the “melding of fact and fic-
tion” in Romantic-era travel literature, isolating the role of mobility as both
a potentiating and destabilizing force in the narratives of empire (1–2). Steve
Clark, in like manner, finds “The dividing line between fact and fiction”
in such writings to be “traditionally elusive” (2), with the implication that
consumers of such works—an audience second in number only to readers of
novels and romances (Leask 273)—were typically armed with scepticism as
well as expectation in confronting these texts. Indeed, we might say that for
many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers, knowledge of the wider
world was not based on a strict adjudication of fact and fiction, a sifting of
one from the other, so much as an acceptance of both as an indelible part of
the process of making geographic space.
We have adopted a similar approach to an understanding and apprecia-
tion of the great varieties of wild space—even wilderness—on offer in an
Anglo-European Romantic context. Rather than cleave to the construc-
tivist extreme, whereby nature is evacuated of all presence other than the
symbolic, or embrace an essentialism through which the inherently crea-
tive process of “making space” discursively is elided, the essays that follow
position wildness alternately as “actuality” (to use Nash’s term), subjective
­experience, mutable process, contested construct, and imagined possibil-
ity. We concur, in short, with the Vanninis’s artful distillation of the issue:
“Wilderness may be an illusion, but it is also real in many ways” (31). The
Romantics certainly found it to be both, whether in faraway geographies,
some pieced together from books alone, or in the immediate contexts of
their lived experience—in paths walked, gardens worked, worlds wilded.

Internal geographies
One cannot map the natural world, especially in its wildness, without dis-
covering in the process corresponding regions within—after-images but
also more than this. As Richard Sha and Joel Faflak argue in their illumi-
nating volume Romanticism and the Emotions (2014), “emotion is the matrix
through which the world is brought to our sensoria; it registers our response
to this world; it worlds our world and thus makes sense of sense” (1). The
emphasis here is on a subjective response through which the world is fil-
tered, ordered, and then integrated into existing cognitive and emotional
schema. But this is not to suggest that an encounter with what is new or
hitherto uninterrogated or uncharted—an expression of wildness in phys-
ical space—invariably culminates in familiarization. The mind is not an
organ of mere Procrustean reflexes; it also shifts its bearings, albeit often
gradually, in response to stimuli that exceed our immediate protocols of in-
tegration. Romantic-era audiences, for example, owed a burgeoning lexical
catalogue of elevated emotions—and perhaps a disposition to the emotions
themselves—to the mapping of the sublime. Indeed, even before Edmund
Burke’s ground-breaking treatise on the subject, John Baillie’s An essay on
 Introduction 11
the sublime (1747) had already prepared eighteenth-century readers for an
expansion of the inner world from encounters with natural immensity:

every Person upon seeing a grand Object is affected with something

which as it were extends his own Being, and expands it to a kind of
immensity. Thus in viewing the Heavens, how is the Soul elevated; and
stretching itself to larger Scenes and more extended Prospects, in a no-
ble Enthusiasm of Grandeur quits the narrow Earth, darts from Planet
to Planet, and takes in worlds at one View! (4)

Baillie’s metaphors of emotional elasticity serve to develop a mental geog-

raphy that is unconstrained by the laws of the physical universe and thus
more replete with, or open to, areas of uncharted, even cosmic, wildness.
A discrete sensory encounter—“seeing” a single “Grand object”—here sets
in motion a process of expansion, a multidirectional dilation of experience,
that leads the subject at once deeper within and further without. Burke,
although he localizes the feeling of astonishment more directly in the over-
whelmment of particular sensory organs—the eye, for example, which in
response to grand objects, “vibrat[es] in all its parts . . . and consequently
must produce an idea of the sublime” (132)—corroborates Baillie’s account
of an inner elevation that radically expands one’s spatial and experiential
horizons. Commenting on the inestimable value of “a search into the human
mind” potentiated by encounters with sublime scenery, he traces the ulti-
mate ascent of human enquiry directly to “the counsels of the Almighty by a
consideration of his works” and concludes that “This elevation of the mind
ought to be the principal end of all our studies” (35). In Baillie’s “Heavens”
Burke finds God and thus turns mere astonishment to worship.
Yet in the complex emotional matrix of Romantic-era writing, the out-
pourings of sublime enthusiasm are but one expression of what we might
designate as extreme, unregulated, or “wild” feelings. Wordsworth’s
well-travelled delineation of “good poetry”—and the creative process more
generally—as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion” (“Preface”
xiv) cannot be dismissed in this context as mere Romantic myth-making. Of
particular interest in his formulation is the implied structure that precedes,
one might even say enables, “overflow.” Indeed, this latter word discloses
in its prefix an assumption of unacknowledged forms or boundaries whose
function is perhaps best understood as giving shape to and orienting,
rather than prohibiting, the expression or trajectory of overabundance. To
put it another way, wildness and cultivation whether in the realm of feel-
ings or spaces, inner or outer geographies, have a mutually conditioning
relationship.
That idea lies at the heart of one of the period’s most important but also
critically neglected reflections on poetry, emotion, and wildness: Francis
Jeffrey’s 1814 review of Byron’s “The Corsair” and “The Bride of Abydos”
in the Edinburgh Review. Six years before the publication of Thomas Love
12 Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch
Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Jeffrey undertakes a similarly contro-
versial project in mapping a sequence of poetic development that includes
the writers of his own day and age. Like Peacock, Jeffrey attunes his anal-
ysis to the regressive elements of contemporary poetics, yet his conclusions
about their value differ sharply. Acknowledging that “the general history of
poetry” unfolds in a “cycle,” he distils its distinguishing variable as a slow
progress of emotions from “violent” passions in “rude ages” to a “refinement
of manners” which “exclude[s] the coarseness and offence of unrestrained
and selfish emotions” (199). Over time, however, this refinement gives way
to “the petty pretensions and joyless elegancies of fashion,” out of which
arises a renewed “avidity for strong emotions, which cannot be repressed”
(200). The result, according to Jeffrey, is that “The feats of chivalry, and the
loves of romance, are revived with more than their primitive wildness and
ardour” (201). In Byron he finds the exemplar of this intensified “wildness”:
a poet who “delineate[s] with unequalled force and fidelity, the workings of
those deep and powerful emotions which alternately enchant and agonize
the minds of those who are exposed to their inroads” (198). An appetite for
such emotions, for inner wilding, becomes for Jeffrey “the true characteris-
tic of this age of the world” (201).
Jeffrey’s conclusion, removed from its dynamic context of successive rev-
olutions, has shaped an enduring narrative of the Romantic period, one that
is rehearsed by Roderick Frazier Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind
(1967) as well as Christopher Thacker in The Wildness Pleases: The Origins
of Romanticism (1983)—arguably the two most influential t­ wentieth-century
reflections on the role of the wild in the Romantic imaginary. For both schol-
ars, Romantic wildness, rooted in the aesthetic of the sublime but expressing
itself in discourses social, cultural, and political, precipitated an investment
in spaces and feelings remote from and critical of civilized life. Thacker’s
distillation of this retreat is particularly telling: “These writers, artists,
dilletanti or amateurs in the eighteenth century were all trying, clearly or
confusedly, with or without intelligence, and with degrees of sincerity and
hypocrisy . . . to escape from what they were” (197–198). Thacker goes on to
associate their ontological crisis with life in the city but eventually resolves
upon the word “artificial” (198) to capture the essence of “what they were”—
and presumably what wildness is not. Yet if we return to Jeffrey’s cyclical
history of poetry and to Wordsworth’s valuation of emotional “overflow”
in poetic expression, we can see that the “wild” is not simply a contradic-
tion, indictment, or disavowal of the restraints of convention and cultiva-
tion, whether they emanate from urban life or a lived artificiality. The essays
in this collection reveal a continual interplay between the wild and the or-
dered, the self-willed and the regulated, a crossing of boundaries—even a
coinherence—suggestive of dynamic interrelation. As Van Horn suggests,
“wildness . . . is an ongoing relationship, one in which human cultures—
through active participation and humble restraint—become attuned to the
community of life” (4). For writers of Anglo-European Romanticism, this
 Introduction 13
relationship reveals varying levels of attunement and, in turn, shifting un-
derstandings of what constitutes, and how best to live in, a “community of
life”—a challenge, we hasten to add, in which twenty-first-century readers
are likewise vitally implicated.

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Wiley, Michael. Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces. Pal-
grave, 1998.
Wordsworth, William. A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of Eng-
land, edited by Nicholas Mason, Paul Westover, and Shannon Stimpson. Roman-
tic Circles, 2020. https://Romantic-circles.org/editions/guide_lakes/editions.2020.
guide_lakes.1835.html.
. “Preface.” Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2 vols., 2nd ed. Longman and
Rees, 1800, pp. v–xlvi.
1 Weakness and wildness in
Wordsworth’s “The Brothers”
Emma Mason

Before the main dialogue of Wordsworth’s “The Brothers,” the Priest of En-
nerdale describes Leonard Ewbank as “one of those who needs must leave
the path / Of the world’s business to go wild alone” (lines 102–103). Like the
Priest’s other conjectures about Leonard—that he is a stranger, a tourist,
an idler—the designation “wild” hardly seems appropriate as the narrative
unfolds. A mariner who has returned to his old village to reconnect with his
brother, James, Leonard moves from a state of curious displacement to one
of fraternal grief as the Priest relates the deaths of his father and brother.
By the end of the poem he is the very opposite of a wild man, and assumes
the demeanour of an ostensibly weak and tragic figure. Yet Leonard’s weak-
ness comes into focus as a virtue when read in relationship to his assumed
wildness. Broken by his exile in the wilderness spaces of the sea and the col-
ony, Leonard’s separation from his family empties him of any strong or wild
sense of self, will, or entitlement. This chapter reads this withdrawal from
wildness through kenosis, a word that describes Christ’s self-emptying of
his divinity in Philippians 2:7. As a form of kenosis, Leonard’s weakness can
be read as a mode of relationship and affection that serves as an example to
the Priest, whose dismissal of the stranger betrays his vocation and mission.
As Leonard writes in a letter to the Priest sent following their encounter, it
“was from the weakness of his heart, / He had not dared to tell him, who he
was” (lines 427–429). These words have invited disdain from some critics.
Charles Rzepka, for example, calls them a “half-hearted” and “vague and
inadequate” rationale for Leonard’s unwillingness to reveal his identity dur-
ing his meeting with the Priest (81–82). But their fragility leaves an imprint
of Leonard’s weak and loving disposition on both the initially strong-willed
Priest and the poem’s narrative. For his weak approach to his village and
the Priest presents the reader with a pastoral model of affection in which the
wilderness moves its inhabitants into weakness and replaces certainty with
dialogue. Wordsworth’s pastoral thus goes beyond a defence of displaced
small-holders and their affection for the land to embrace the experiences of
all who live or visit rural sites, however contradictory (Wordsworth, Letter
322). The deliberately unresolved ending of the “The Brothers” (like its twin
pastoral “Michael”) transforms the desire for certainty into the acceptance
16 Emma Mason
of ambivalence as the basis for open exchange in which those involved be-
come attuned to the emotional lives of each other.
This chapter begins by making an argument for weakness both as the
consequence of time spent in the wilderness and as a methodological mode
of enquiry based on Eve Sedgwick’s weak reparative theory and Gianni Vat-
timo’s weak thinking. Both promote the weak claims of charity and love:
Sedgwick in relation to “strong” critics who, having wrestled their meaning
from the text, are reluctant to admit the readings of others; and Vattimo
in relation to the authoritative truth of God, which kenosis replaces with
forgiveness, hospitality, and generosity. Sedgwick and Vattimo set the stage
for my reading of Wordsworth’s low and rustic pastoral form as “weak,” one
that leads readers, not into clarity and truths that restrict further thought
and interpretation, but into uncertainty as a mode of possibility. As Fiona
Stafford argues, Wordsworth’s revival of pastoral contributed to a cultural
promotion of life, hope, and health founded on plainness and simplicity.
Restoring the form to “its original habitat, among real sheep and pastur-
age,” she writes, Wordsworth strips it of what he called the “motley mas-
querade” of poetic “tricks” and “fancies” to reinstate a gentler language
of kinship and sympathy (Wordsworth, “Appendix” 299; Stafford 121). But
this language is also shaped by Christian humility, a trait rarely apparent
in Wordsworth’s self-identified religious characters like the Priest of Enner-
dale, but unknowingly made available to them by resigned and patient fig-
ures like Leonard. As Wordsworth argued in Essays on Epitaphs, to which
I turn in the second half of the chapter, the “strong” views of the assured
and certain are more suited to cliché, satire, and pastiche, which often vio-
lently reduce the lives and philosophies of the weak to the level of caricature
and so deem them redundant and expendable. As itself a weak mode, how-
ever, pastoral negates the strong structures of metaphysics to sustain weak
moments of relationship and interpretation in which readers are invited to
reflect and respond rather than review and decode. In this light, pastoral
becomes more than a series of what Rob Nixon calls “redemptive silences”
within a “spiritual geography” that overlooks the “historical hauntings” on
which it is founded (238). Nixon’s dismissal of its consolatory possibilities
ignores the weak strategies the form offers poets to engender moments of af-
fection between humans and nonhumans, strangers and friends. As I argue
here, it is the uncertainty and loss that Leonard encounters in the landscape
and wilderness of his rural home that softens him to what he finds there and
enables his dialogue with the irritable Priest.
If the relationship between wildness and wilderness becomes a site for the
exploration of ideas that help to define the Romantic period as this volume
illustrates, then the religious and spiritual are central to it. As Laura Feldt
argues, ideas of wilderness—forests, deserts, oceans, mountains—define
the history of religion and belief as the faithful seek vital and raw spaces in
which to experience the soul, God, the divine, and the spiritual self (1). Like
Moses, both John the Baptist and Jesus walk into wilderness spaces to find
 Weakness and wildness 17
redemption through God’s presence following periods of trial, suffering,
and defamiliarization. For David Jasper, the desert wilderness in particular
offers an invitation to meet God by imitating and so participating in Je-
sus’s suffering and meditation there (15). The desert, like the ocean, reminds
the individual that he or she is powerless in the face of its vast and ancient
immensity and must relinquish strong claims on the self. This process of
self-forgetting or self-emptying is called kenosis in Christian tradition, a
Greek term that describes the individual willingly throwing off aspirations
to power and authority to embrace weakness and vulnerability. Paul uses the
word kenosis to describe the incarnation, an event in which Christ tempo-
rarily “empties” himself of divinity to become Jesus the human and entirely
receptive to God’s will. Paul describes this transformation in his Epistle to
the Philippians as a paradigm for his readers to follow, and encourages them
to enter into kenosis through the imagination: “Let this mind be in you,
which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it
not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and
took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men”
(King James, Phil. 2:5–7). For many readers of Philippians, kenosis reveals
Christianity as a religion of humility, forgiveness, and patience through its
instruction to renounce power, authority, and transcendence. Gianni Vat-
timo in particular turns to kenosis as the basis for his philosophy of pensiero
debole or weak thinking, in which he promotes the weak claims of charity
and love over the strong truth of God (Belief, “Weak Thought”). Like the
theologian John Caputo, who also celebrates the weakness of God, Vatti-
mo’s philosophy makes uncertainty and negation the condition for thinking
and reflection as well as kindness and sympathy (Caputo, Weakness).
In this context, weak thinking means interpreting without certainty in a
manner analogous to Keats’s negative capability wherein we dwell in “mys-
teries” and “doubts” and refrain from the reach for “fact and reason” (60).
This idea has necessarily troubled some readers, for whom the turn to weak-
ness translates into precarity and indecision, or worse, relativity and a lack
of conviction. Yet for those who endorse weak thought and the modes of ex-
pression that emerge from it, weakness holds the potential to overcome dog-
matic, binary, and fixed methodologies that are, as Sedgwick argues, both
paranoid and suspicious (124–125). For Sedgwick, there is nothing wrong
with paranoid reading until it becomes so dominant in critical approaches to
texts that “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance” is dis-
missed as “naïve, pious, or complaisant” (126). Paranoid reading is in effect
“strong” reading, and powerfully (and often defensively) overshadows and
disavows other approaches to pose “as the very stuff of truth” (133, 135, 138).
As such, strong reading and thinking are not only monopolistic, but symbol-
ically violent, intent as they are on the exposure (and then erasure) of that
with which they disagree as irrelevant and obscure (141). Sedgwick offers
reparative reading as a weak counter, a queer cultural mode which privileges
mistakes, pleasure, and “soft” reform as the basis for a critical practice (and
18 Emma Mason
explicitly not a theoretical ideology). While she in the end favours an ap-
proach that brings the paranoid and reparative together to “interdigitate,”
the hermeneutic foundation of such relationship is necessarily weak because
any intervention by strong thought neutralizes its opposite. Thinkers such
as Paul Ricœur, Peter Elbow, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick concur, explicating
suspicious, cynical, and doubtful approaches to reading and interpretation
in order to defend generosity, subjectivity, creativity, and belief. As Fitzpat-
rick argues in her defence of “generous thinking,” only those who practise a
nondualist and charitable mode of criticism can bring critical distance and
emotional response together (107). Strong thinkers, by contrast, dismiss the
affective to “wrest” meaning from texts and then furiously and competi-
tively defend their discoveries. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus argue,
this forceful approach, exemplified by critics like Harold Bloom or Frederic
Jameson, regards contradictions and tensions as “clues” to otherwise veiled
historical and political truths, and not precursors to uncertain dialogue (7).
Even if critics could agree that criticism was a “strenuous and heroic” form
of labour, the certainty this perspective requires is arguably no longer avail-
able. Timothy Morton’s term “hyperobjects” underlines the redundancy of
strong, assured thought based on individual distinction. Comprising things
and phenomena that massively transcend particular spatiotemporal con-
texts, hyperobjects describe anything that transforms and eventually out-
lasts the lives of human beings—global warming, polystyrene, radiation,
the biosphere, plutonium, oil reserves, viruses. They thus reveal human
sovereignty and claims to power as a fiction, one that begins to be disman-
tled in the late eighteenth century with the advent of steam. Morton’s argu-
ment that viscous and nonlocal phenomena like steam and later oil simply
exceed human attempts to control their influence on the world speaks to
Wordsworth’s willing relinquishment of human power for relational weak-
ness. Romantic pastoral is a response to steam not because it nostalgically
idealizes the land as somehow separate from the influence of hyperobjects,
but because it accepts existence as an entanglement of different things, be-
ings, and perspectives. Wordsworth’s defence of weakness, then, resonates
through Morton’s assertion that humans should relinquish power to con-
front our own fragility and finitude and become more “mindful.” By em-
bracing a state of “awareness” and “simple letting-be,” he writes, we will
experience a “deep acceptance of co-existence” and “inner depth” through
which to “comprehend infinity” and abandon “the search for ultimate men
and supermen” (Hyperobjects 176, 199). The religiosity of the terminology
used here—mindfulness, co-existence, infinity—is made more apparent
when Morton concludes his book with a reference to Heidegger’s infamous
statement, “only a god can save us now”: “We just don’t know what sort of
god,” Morton writes (201). But his own discussion in which strong thinking
and ultimate supermen are questioned by a willingness to sit with uncer-
tainty suggests that he does know what kind of god might make sense of an
undetermined world—a weak one. Vattimo directly answers his question
 Weakness and wildness 19
by rephrasing Heidegger’s statement as “only a ‘kenotic’ god can save us”
(Farewell 47). For Vattimo, despite the best efforts of institutional Christi-
anity to distort the weakness of its own belief system into a “strong” dogma-
tism, the death and kenosis of Jesus suggest otherwise (Farewell 63). Weak
Christianity is not a metaphysics or set of sacred or dogmatic claims, then,
but rather an ecumenical hermeneutic that infinitely changes our interpre-
tive direction towards charity and love (Farewell 126).
Removed from the violent objectivism of metaphysics and the literalism
of orthodoxy, Vattimo’s Christianity is a charitable, desacralized approach
to interpretation and relationship that welcomes conflicting and multiple
perspectives (After the Death 99, 102). But he goes further to argue that
only the poem can best articulate such diversity, a form that he suggests
refuses the self-evident without collapsing into an interpretive jumble in
which meaningfulness is excised. In his essay, “The Shattering of the Po-
etic Word,” Vattimo argues that the undecidability of the poem allows the
reader to become acquainted with and experience truths without rushing
to affirm them. Poetry’s resistance to fixed or self-evident meaning leads
to a fracturing of the word that reveals language not as an instrumental
means for “showing things,” but as a way to experience being and mortal-
ity. Poetic language “opens up” our worlds, their possible horizons, and
the “unfolded meanings” within them to then break them up (End of Mo-
dernity 71–72). While readers always engage with a poem in a particular
moment, the poem’s passage through time allows for infinite reinterpre-
tations (including those that dismiss it as a text worth reading at all) and
so creates the space for a weak thinking in which readers move closer to
or further away from various meanings, ideas, and definitions. The poem
thus serves as a “monument” or tombstone for Vattimo, that which in-
scribes meanings but leaves them to fade and crumble: the poet’s effort to
shape and “sculpt” the poem is thus “an anticipation of the essentializing
erosion that time exerts upon the work” (End of Modernity 75). For readers
of Wordsworth, Vattimo’s description instantly recalls epitaphic moments
in his poetry (the last two lines of “The Brothers,” for example, to which
I return below), and the opening statement to the first of his Essays Upon
Epitaphs, in which Wordsworth writers that “an Epitaph presupposes a
Monument” to unite “the two worlds of the living and the dead” (Essays
49, 60). Prominently located in the parish-church, “the visible centre of a
community of the living and the dead,” epitaphs bring together those who
view them in a moment of quiet remembrance experienced “in the light of
love” (Essays 56, 63). Like Vattimo’s poem, the epitaph is irreducible to
its ostensible meaning (its content suggests that there are no “bad People
buried” in graveyards), but it is also kenotic and weak in that it encourages
remembrance while emptying itself of assertion or judgement (Essays 63).
As the precondition for weakness, the parish graveyard is itself a kind of
wilderness in which certainty and order are exchanged for interaction and
sympathy.
20 Emma Mason
The most affecting epitaph Wordsworth discusses in his Essays is recog-
nizably weak, engraved as it is on “a very Small Stone laid upon the ground,
bearing nothing more than the name of the Deceased with the date of birth
and death, importing that it was an Infant which had been born one day
and died the following” (Essays 93). As an ontological statement about ex-
istence, these dates free the reader into an experience of the reality of this
death—“awful thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remem-
brances stealing away or vanishing”—and so illuminate the depth of grief
the living must negotiate (Essays 93). At the same time, this truth is one that
might shift (or shatter) the more it is remembered and reflected on, and so
transform into other meanings, such as gratitude for hopes and lives that
are fulfilled or the solace of a supportive community. The dates thus do
exactly what Wordsworth requires of language: they incarnate rather than
“clothe” thought by moving the reader away from artificial, mannered,
and laboured epitaphs to a textual presence that requires stillness and si-
lence. This much cited passage from the third essay, in which language, “if
it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet” turns into a violent and wild
“counter-spirit,” “noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste,
to vitiate, and to dissolve,” is often read through suspicion, if not paranoia,
as contradictory and conflicted (Essays 85). Yet read through kenosis, the
statement that language should work to sustain meanings that quietly nour-
ish the reader speaks to a moral responsibility to communicate without de-
stroying the perspective of those with whom one disagrees. Vattimo almost
restates Wordsworth’s commentary in his suggestion that communication
free of “metaphysical rigidity” conceives meaning (and so ethics and moral-
ity) as weak “negotiation” (Transparent 118). It is this weakness that I argue
Leonard embodies and that the poem more broadly promotes through its
dependence on weak forms of communication and response. The second
part of this chapter explicates Wordsworth’s defence of Leonard’s weakness,
one learned through his time in the wilderness, and realized in the poem’s
internal critique of metaphysical and orthodox rigidity as figured through
the Priest.
From the opening lines of “The Brothers,” the Priest of Ennerdale is
presented as a cheerful but disparaging figure who immediately condemns
Leonard as a lounging sightseer. The Priest’s frustration is palpable: he is
averse to anyone he does not immediately recognize as part of his parish,
and is particularly resistant to “idle” tourists for whom his churchyard
promises aesthetic pleasure. That he ought to recognize his former parish-
ioner is an uncomfortable aspect of the narrative that resounds through-
out the ensuing dialogue between the two men. As the Priest remains in
ignorance, the reader learns that Leonard once lived in Ennerdale with his
family, to whom he wishes to return following “twenty seasons” on the sea
(line 41). Set against the increasingly impatient Priest, now eager to “ac-
cost / The Stranger,” the character of Leonard is a gentler and more vision-
ary presence, “half a Shepherd on the stormy seas” for whom the “broad
 Weakness and wildness 21
green wave and sparkling foam” would flash up images of the former moun-
tains, hills, and sheep with whom he spent his childhood (lines 35–36, 43,
53). Following Alan Bewell, readers regard this passage as a description of
calenture, and Leonard “in danger of falling victim” to a nostalgic “fiction”
in which he drowns “in a landscape of his own making” (60). While his
colonial encounter with the “Indian Isles” drives his longing for an ideal-
ized pastoral and domestic home, Leonard does not sustain this fiction on
return to Ennerdale. Rather, he is weakened on arrival in the village: the
narrator conveys that “his heart / Fail’d in him” as he approaches his former
home and he remains confused and disoriented by the nameless graveyard
of which the Priest is so proud (lines 74–75). This confusion is not presented
negatively, however. His memory of losing his way earlier that afternoon
comforts Leonard, who is increasingly at ease with the uncertainty of his
present moment, a stark contrast with both the instrumental aims of his
abandoned commercialism on the sea and the assured convictions of the
Priest. The Priest’s mannerisms, language, and body language in the first
half of the poem in particular paint him as a censorious figure who abruptly
“stop[s] short” at the “church-yard gate” to view Leonard, and smiles com-
placently before executing a startling misreading of him (lines 98–99). He
assumes the stranger is a self-involved hedonist, “one of those who needs
must leave the path / Of the world’s business to go wild alone” and eager
to follow “his fancies by the hour” (lines 102–103, 106). This undiscerning
reading is even more misplaced when compared to Leonard’s uncertain but
careful perception of their interaction, which the narrator presents as a far
more reliable compass to its affective content.
Leonard’s affective intuition is further apparent in one of the poem’s piv-
otal narrative devices—that the Priest fails to recognize him even as he re-
members the Priest. Leonard’s reading of his former vicar as “quiet” and
“peaceful” is perhaps generous in light of the latter’s curt welcome, but it is
consistent with his propensity to find the weak and gentle in others, a fore-
bear of Fitzpatrick’s generous thinking (lines 118–119). It also introduces
a recurrent motif in the poem, namely, weak moments of relationship and
interpretation that serve as affective touchstones to map the story for the
reader. These moments move us towards an understanding of the poem in
which incomplete and unresolved details offer a way out of conclusive judge-
ments rather than pointing to stylistic or narrative failure. In other words,
“The Brothers” resists diagnostic exposition to free itself from what Vattimo
calls the categorizing, measuring, and framing impulses of strong structures
like the Enlightenment that equate weakness with deficiency (“Foreword”
xiv). The dialogue between the Priest and Leonard, for example, stages an
interaction between the former’s desire to “chronicle” the history of Enner-
dale and the latter’s willingness to listen incognito (line 160). On the surface,
this appears like a struggle between two forms of weakness—the Priest un-
interested in “facts or dates” to relate the history of the village, and Leonard
hiding his identity in order to indirectly learn about his family (line 159).
22 Emma Mason
Yet the Priest’s refusal to rely on “symbols” or “names and epitaphs” in his
churchyard is a strong, categorizing move (lines 176, 179). The village osten-
sibly has “no need” of gravestones because its members talk with each other
about the dead (line 176). But the absence of any symbols or epitaphs neces-
sarily excludes anyone not immediately involved in their community—like
Leonard—as well as anyone who might wish to mourn the dead in the dark.
Only through Leonard’s sensitive and attentive engagement with the Priest
can he conceptualize the “second life” the dead possess in the memories of
his former community (line 183). Self-emptied of ego and so receptive to
those he encounters, Leonard enacts exactly what the Priest ought to repre-
sent but does not: openness and hospitality. While Leonard is not in fact a
“stranger on this land” (King James, Ps. 119), he accepts this status in order
to embody the powerlessness and vulnerability learned through his former
experience in the wilderness.
The link between wilderness and weakness is further deepened by the
Priest’s description of Leonard’s father Walter and brother James. Walter
and James are both depicted as suffering their own wilderness experiences,
Walter through his harsh struggle “with bond, / Interest, and mortgages,”
and James in relation to his sleepwalking (lines 212–213). Like Leonard,
his father and brother are opened into sustained weakness through their
time in the wilderness. The Priest appears to almost comprehend Walter’s
weakened being by splitting him into two personas or “Two fathers in one
father”—the labourer and the caring parent. But he has to feminize Walter
to do so, describing him as “half a mother” and thus gendering weakness
as female (lines 228, 233). Leonard, however, is more comfortable with his
weakened status: he weeps and is visibly overcome by the Priest’s narration,
which becomes progressively more sympathetic as he witnesses Leonard’s
response. The young Leonard is already saint-like in the Priest’s account,
in which he appears tenderly caring for James and, during their ambles in
the mountains, “Bearing his Brother on his back” in an echo of St. Chris-
topher carrying the child Christ (line 255). Indeed, the two brothers are like
beloveds to each other, twin “springs which bubbled side by side” and “Roe-
bucks” that bound “o’er the hills” (lines 138, 273) in a direct reference to
the Song of Solomon’s description of lovers “leaping upon the mountains,
skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart” (King
James, Song of Sol. 2:8–9). The Priest frames these references with further
religious comments—God as the maker of the book of nature, for example,
and the Priest’s gift of a Bible to Leonard before he left Ennerdale—both of
which Leonard notably interrupts. For he wishes to push past the Priest’s
nostalgic tale of a parish of able workers and good church-goers into stories
about relationship, emotion, and familial love. After all, his family’s former
obsession with work as a moral good is what justifies Leonard’s departure
from his community in the first place, and specifically his abandonment of
James. Following the death of his father, who is left “too weak” (with the
emphasis on “too” here) after his investment in the estate and their home,
 Weakness and wildness 23
Leonard takes up the offer of work from an uncle “chiefly for his Broth-
er’s sake” (lines 295, 301). His silence on his life away from Ennerdale is an
implicit critique of the horrors of trafficking and slavery: as a wilderness
experience, it is one that breaks rather than simply weakens those within it.
Leonard’s redemption comes through his love for James, the brother from
whom he learned weakness as a child, and whose memory returns him to
weakness from brokenness even after his death.
James’s kenosis is, like Christ’s, one that culminates in death, and, if not
resurrection, an ascension through his continued weak influence on the vil-
lage. A spirited “Mountain Boy” and “Child of all the dale,” James is directly
associated with wilderness (lines 332, 339). His decline following Leonard’s
departure provokes an outpouring of affection from the community, who
shelter, feed, and take care of him. But his pining for Leonard culminates in
a serious case of somnambulism, in which he habitually sleepwalks in search
of his beloved sibling. Mourning the loss of Leonard, whom he and the vil-
lage assume is now dead, James seeks solace in the mountains and one day
sleepwalks off the summit known as “The Pillar.” While the Priest is himself
weakened at this point in the narrative by the visibly moved Leonard, he
is unable to resist embellishing his story with the grisly details of James’s
“mangled limbs” and details of his burial the “third day after” he was found
(lines 378–379). But James’s weakness is redeemed here: while he is buried
rather than rises again on the third day like the crucified Christ, the echo of
the resurrection tells the reader that James lives again in the affection the
villagers have for him. This is in part because, unlike the dead buried in the
sign-less churchyard, James’s death is marked by the also Christ-like sym-
bol of his “Shepherd’s staff,” which “caught” on the side of the rock from
which he fell, and hung “there for many years” before it “mouldered” away
(lines 400–403). While this is not a permanent tombstone, it is a shattered
one that has since materially vanished, but is spiritually still apparent to
those who look on “The Pillar” and remember James. The staff also brings
the Priest’s narrative to a close and both he and Leonard fall into silence.
The Priest’s rambling, occasionally insensitive, and sometimes elaborated
story stands in stark contrast to Leonard’s minimal and slight utterances:
where the Priest “clothes” his thoughts with too many words, Leonard in-
variably “incarnates” his emotions and grief. If the Priest’s narrative does
not quite derange or dissolve the affective meaning of his account, neither
does it nourish as do Leonard’s words. One might even imagine a kind of
sub-poem comprised only of Leonard’s contributions, a text able to sustain
the affections on which “The Brothers” is focussed, albeit weakly without
the intrusion of the Priest’s “strong” narration.
While the Priest is gentled by Leonard’s visible grief at James’s death, it is
not enough for him to recognize his former parishioner. Leonard, however,
is almost paralysed by grief at this point in the poem, and both men de-
part without further conversation. Yet like Wordsworth’s epitaph that bears
only the name of the deceased with the date of birth and death, Leonard’s
24 Emma Mason
concluding and scarce sentence, “My Brother,” discloses more than the
Priest’s entire recital:

The Stranger would have thank’d him, but he felt

Tears rushing in; both left the spot in silence,
And Leonard, when they reach’d the church-yard gate,
As the Priest lifted up the latch, turn’d round,
And, looking at the grave, he said, “My Brother.”
The Vicar did not hear the words. (lines 403–408)

The Priest’s failure to hear Leonard corresponds to his broader inability to

see him. There is no question that the Priest warms to him through their
interaction, and even invites Leonard in for supper. But he effectively breaks
the bonds of the community his narration eulogizes because of what Paul
Magnuson calls his “simple literalism,” one that leaves Leonard a stranger
“separated from local and public knowledge” (260). The “festival” the Priest
promises would joyously greet the returned Leonard is traded for misrecog-
nition and then silence, after which the reader is left only with Leonard’s
reflections on his brother and home (line 308). The tragedy of the poem is
pronounced here, and yet there is another way of reading its conclusion that
recognizes redemption, if not for Leonard, then at least for the Priest. Leon-
ard’s thoughtful, kind, and attentive conduct not only reverses the Priest’s
initial perception of him, but reminds him of the duty his vocation requires:
to be hospitable towards strangers. That this moment of realization comes
as a result of Leonard’s weakness is emphasized in the poem’s final lines,
in which the spotlight falls on Leonard alone. Still reeling from the news
of James’s death, Leonard stops by a grove and pauses under the trees to
review “All that the Priest had said”:

his early years

Were with him in his heart: his cherish’d hopes,
And thoughts which had been his an hour before,
All press’d on him with such a weight, that now,
This vale, where he had been so happy, seem’d
A place in which he could not bear to live:
So he relinquish’d all his purposes.
He travell’d on to Egremont: and thence,
That night, he wrote a letter to the Priest,
Reminding him of what had pass’d between them;
And adding, with a hope to be forgiven,
That it was from the weakness of his heart
He had not dared to tell him who he was.

This done, he went on shipboard, and is now

A Seaman, a grey-headed Mariner. (lines 417–431)
 Weakness and wildness 25
Leonard has dashed his own “cherished hopes” here: unable to call him-
self a Ewbank in front of the Priest, he is dissociated from the vale and the
community that might have offered him solace (line 418). Yet Leonard does
reveal his identity in the end, and writes to the Priest that “it was from the
weakness of his heart” that he remained anonymous during their dialogue
(line 428). As Kurt Fosso argues, Leonard is reconnected to his former par-
ish by becoming “a part of the community’s exclusive economy of oral epi-
taphs” in the form of his encounter with, and then letter to, the Priest (153).
For Fosso, this suggests that those who elegize the dead legislate for a com-
munity integrated by the “mourning-work” of the living for the lost (154).
But the Priest is not fit for this role before his encounter with Leonard, and
it is the latter’s heartfelt weakness that transforms him from oral historian
to compassionate pastor.
If “The Brothers” ended here it might fall prey to Nixon’s critique of the
pastoral, and leave the reader only with the “redemptive silence” with which
the narrative closes. But the final two lines block any such reading. Many
critics have noted the epitaphic nature of these lines, detached on the page
and sharply divergent in tone and feel from the preceding emotional dia-
logue (Fosso 153; Wolfson 84). They also mark Leonard’s return to the wil-
derness from which he arrived and suspend him there indefinitely: he does
not simply go “on shipboard,” but remains there until he is an old man, “a
grey-headed Mariner” (lines 430–431). One might read these lines as a kind
of obituary for Leonard, who is now superfluous to the narrative following
his renewal of the Priest’s vocation. They also intimate Leonard’s retreat
from the weakness he incarnated in the dialogue and letter alike, and con-
sequent surrender to the certainty that life as a mariner guarantees. The sea
is no longer a wilderness from which the individual emerges emptied of self
and ambition, but a place of inevitable employment. The poem appears to
close with this acquiescence to a strong existence defined by the colonialism
and trade from which Leonard initially fled. Any possibility that he might
reappear in Ennerdale is completely voided by this pragmatic curtain fall,
one that parallels Michael’s paralysis as he sits with his dog at the unfinished
Sheep-fold at Green-head Gill. Yet, like Michael, who offers the reader hope
through his love for his dog and family, Leonard leaves behind a repara-
tive and mindful quietude that offers more than spiritual strength to the
Priest—it reminds him for whom the churchyard and Parish Chapel exist:
the strange, weak, and dispossessed. Leonard’s departure also affirms how
difficult it is to sustain a weak outlook and disposition in the world, one that
even James only preserves because of his early death.
Weakness is presented as a virtue in the poem, then, but one that needs to
“interdigitate,” to use Sedgwick’s term, with strength and wildness, rather
than swing fully back into an egoic intransigence. It is perhaps this inter-
mediate state that the Priest comes to enjoy, one in which he is silent and
reverential before Leonard’s grief, but gracious and accommodating as he
invites him in for supper. His initially strong reading of the stranger is now
26 Emma Mason
fully modulated by Leonard’s weakness, which simultaneously serves as a
reminder that the religion he serves is a weak one in which the only law is
gift and charity (Caputo 235). At last freed from his own imprisonment in a
wilderness of judgement and admonition, the Priest embodies a generative
strength founded on humility and agape and “made perfect in weakness”
(2 Cor. 12:9). While Leonard might not be able to sustain such balance, the
poem suggests that the newly buoyed Priest can, devoted as he is to a God
emptied of will and determination. The reader too is immersed in the wilder-
ness space of the poem, one in which she is moved into a weak and charitable
encounter with the text remote from the “motley masquerade,” not just of
linguistic “tricks,” but also of strong and paranoid criticism. Wordsworth’s
pastoral might not offer direct spiritual guidance to the reader, but weakness
is offered as a possible salve for what he called the “decay of the domes-
tic affections” in his famous letter to Charles James Fox (306). Only by ac-
knowledging the ways in which others “differ from us,” he writes, will those
affections be restored (308). “The Brothers” mediates that difference by cel-
ebrating forms of relationship and interpretation based on weakness and af-
fection, and which obviate the power of the strong, if not paranoid, thinker.

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 Weakness and wildness 27
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2 Wild freedom and careful
wandering in the poetry of
William Wordsworth and
John Clare
Sue Edney

Octavius Gilchrist, writing in The London Magazine in 1820, was keen to de-
tail certain books that the “peasant poet” John Clare had in his possession:
the Bible, a “single volume” of Pope, and Robert Bloomfield’s Wild Flowers,
or, Pastoral and Local Poetry (1806), a title that sums up the dilemma of
nineteenth-century rural working-class poets (9). Intensely domestic, they
were expected to be the voices of order and contentment, paradoxically epit-
omized in wild nonhuman nature. However, Gilchrist’s choice from Clare’s
numerous books also creates an image that fits a middle-class audience’s
appreciation of the humble poet: god-fearing, yet a sensitive man of taste.
Although he called himself a “bard of the wild flowers” towards the end of
his life (Mahood 112–113), Clare was a comprehensive advocate for all wild
nonhuman beings, plant or animal. Wild flowers, though, were especially
loved by the reading public; they had no teeth or claws; they were not scaly,
slimy, or wet; they were, in general, small. So, Clare’s early sonnet “The
Primrose,” in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), “was very
much to the taste of the Town,” observes Molly Mahood and helped to se-
cure Clare’s “public acclaim” (115): “How much thy presence beautifies the
ground: / How sweet thy modest, unaffected pride” (lines 5–6). There is little
of the wild in this poem, and much of the humble, tasteful plebeian who
knows his place. And Clare certainly knew his place: loved it, resisted it,
grieved for it, tried to escape it, and longed to return.
Clare’s wild places are created out of cultivation; nearly all Clare’s poems
are about domestic spaces: his landscape was worked, not wild. Any wilder-
nesses were on the edges, in the small woods, streams, heaths, and fens of his
surroundings. These gave the appearance of being everyone’s property or
no one’s; the majority of Clare’s landscapes belonged to farmers and estate
owners. William Marshall, writing in 1785, had already rejected the notion
of a “natural” English landscape:

Wherever cultivation has set its foot, —wherever the plow and spade have
laid fallow the soil, —Nature is become extinct; and it is in neglected or
less cultivated places, in mosses and mountains, in forests and parochial
wastes, we are to seek for any thing near a state of Nature. (585)
 Wild freedom and careful wandering 29
Wildness was attached to unfettered, unbounded spaces, as well as to hu-
man and nonhuman others. Even as it might provoke anxiety, wildness
as a concept also stirred envious desires for a life without constraint—
restrictions imposed by convention and middle-class propriety for a man
in William Wordsworth’s position, or oppressive labour and extreme pov-
erty in Clare’s situation. Neither “wild” nor “free” carries the same affective
signification for these poets, even when applied to the natural world which
they both loved and celebrated; their different social and domestic situa-
tions necessitated differing interpretations of what might be acceptably wild
and free. “Pastoral” implies safety, and although it is yoked to “wild” in
Bloomfield’s title, they are only flowers. However, the concept of freedom in
its relationship to the wild connects Wordsworth’s and Clare’s philosophy
of place-creation and entanglement in the “life of things,” as Wordsworth
epitomizes life-value in “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” In
Wordsworth’s meditation on human freedom in connection with the free-
dom of nature, the poet connects wild with free in language of the spirit as
much as of nature. In particular, Wordsworth implies that the natural world
can permeate a mind open to its power in such a way that “with an eye made
quiet by the power / Of harmony and the deep power of joy, / We see into the
life of things” (lines 47–49).
Things have stories to tell, matter is “a site of narrativity . . . where the
world reveals its creative becoming, its dynamism and its reenchantment”
(Oppermann 31). Wordsworth and Clare use different story-telling meth-
ods, yet their similarities in the context of “response-ability” are greater
than their differences (Barad, “Interview” 55). Both poets, in other words,
respond to matter in the form of human/nonhuman interactions in contexts
that value “creative becoming” of things themselves and of their own poetic
developments. Their narrative strategies, though, stem from different posi-
tions. Clare celebrates, and often incorporates in his writing, the oral wealth
of stories from his parents, his neighbours and friends, alongside tales read
in the “chap books” he loved as a child and which were often recreated in the
eighteenth-century poems with which he grew up. Wordsworth deliberately
places himself at one remove, looking for a means to unite middle-class lit-
erary experience with rural reality, in a genuine if at times clumsy attempt
to elevate rustic values of frugality, simplicity, and natural beauty beyond
the artifices of literary establishments.
Like many working-class writers such as Stephen Duck and Mary Col-
lier, Clare saw benefits in translating his rural experience through Augustan
poetic practices—using heroic couplets, for example, in settings that, while
not celebrating England’s imperial wealth, explored England’s village lives
at work and leisure. Simon Kövesi argues that a primary view of Clare as
a poet of agricultural Helpston has the potential to be more limiting than
Clare’s actual restriction in Helpston or Northborough. “The awkward-
ness of Clare’s landless occupancy of his place,” writes Kövesi, “is sourced
in an awareness that others in the poetic world,” such as Wordsworth and
30 Sue Edney
Byron whose work Clare knew and admired, “exhibit some choice about the
spaces they move through” (39). Clare’s restriction must be seen as a virtue
however, as Kövesi argues, because it enables Clare to develop imaginative
tactics to “write beyond his situation” (40) while simultaneously creating a
public image of everyday rural life. As John Goodridge describes Clare’s
poetic choices, the “question of how to use eighteenth-century models to
write about the hardship of the rural world, and the destruction wrought
by intensification and enclosure, was a particularly difficult one. Clare drew
on Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, and the sensibility poets, as well as Bloom-
field and Wordsworth, to do so” (270). Bloomfield was Clare’s poetic hero,
close to him in observational understanding of what it was to be a field-
worker. When Giles rests in the field margins in Bloomfield’s The Farm-
er’s Boy (1800), he watches the “swarming insects creep around his head”
(“Summer,” line 74) with the same acute descriptive accuracy and personal
involvement that characterize Clare’s detailed accounts. For Bloomfield,
there is a significant and suggestive freedom exhibited by a “dust-colour’d
beetle” that “climbs with pain” among the long grasses (“Summer,” line 75).
Goodridge comments on the references Clare makes to other working-class
poets in his own work: “There is a genuine sense of solidarity between these
labouring-class men. They share intellectual and literary interests,” and ac-
cording to Goodridge, they also “share a common struggle to escape” from
the confines of a class-based judgement of their literary merits.
However, the popularity of self-taught “peasant” and “artisan” poets
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented a dilemma
for Wordsworth; “[p]easant poetry” made his position “almost impossi-
bly awkward,” explains McEathron, “as he attempted, in the years around
1800, to establish himself as a poet. He was, after all, a writer of rustic verse
who could not profess to be an ‘authentic’ rustic” (5). Wordsworth was as
constrained by established aesthetic models as Clare, although from inside
the establishment, and used some convoluted techniques in order to free
his writing—and, in his opinion, the position of poetry as a transmitter of
truth—from a different kind of ghettoization. Unlike Clare’s “dispatches
from the front,” as John Ashbery characterizes many of his poems (17),
Wordsworth’s determined attempts to have the rural poor “speak” often
render them oddly silent. His rural inhabitants are often isolated individu-
als, beggars, vagrants, ex-soldiers, and sailors, who wander through neces-
sity as much as choice, and are met with on the road by a man who could
afford to walk where he liked. Wordsworth “rarely represents labouring
people engaging in the incidental chatter” of Clare’s poetry, notes Simon
White (152), or how “in some pleasant nook” the haymaking “swain and
maid / Lean oer their rakes and loiter in the shade . . . Hark at that happy
shout – and song between” (“Haymaking” 7–8, 11). In contrast to Clare,
Scott McEathron argues that Wordsworth’s “speakers cannot perform the
task at hand,” that of story-telling, without middle-class poetic intervention
(16). Wordsworth’s desire to raise poetic consciousness on behalf of rural
 Wild freedom and careful wandering 31
themes leads him to create a linguistic relationship with wide-ranging ma-
terialities, resulting in an animating “language of things,” as Adam Potkay
argues (399), intended to be inclusive of the material and immaterial, earth
and spirit. His “things” are “uncontainable by any narrow definition . . .
[T]hey bespeak the fusion of object and event, matter and energy” (Potkay
391). By these means, even the simplest forms and subjects can be elevated
to poetry of both moral and aesthetic value.
One of Wordsworth’s difficulties in his poetic practice is that while the
transcendent lyricism of his personal investigations into spirit and nature is
covered by this ethical “language of things,” much of his writing is narra-
tive, and here Wordsworth stumbles into wild things with which Clare has
quite a different relationship. However profound Wordsworth might profess
his encounter with nonhuman things to be, it is hierarchical; human-related
“things”—ethical and spiritual qualities and practices—are influenced by
“natural” or “wild” freedoms and virtues for the ultimate benefit of the hu-
man. It is at some remove from Clare’s rootedness in matter itself—his com-
pulsive listing that created, for his critics, an over-descriptive poetry; his
collecting of anything he found interesting; “to capture in relation to a spe-
cific environment or locale, whatever natural feature . . . he might witness,”
comments Kövesi. He adds that these “lists” might operate as “communi-
tarian nodes—markers of inclusive connection” (203–204). In these aspects,
Clare has more in common with Dorothy than William Wordsworth, who
recreated in her journals the actualities of daily life in Grasmere in ways
that her brother attempted to rise above.
Erica McAlpine considers Clare’s intensely observational writing to be un-
usually objective in comparison to that of his Romantic contemporaries, who
looked for “deep and spiritual knowledge of the world around them” (79).
However, like Bloomfield’s alter ego Giles, Clare deliberately immersed his
poetry in the materiality of grass, insects, blossom, birds, and animals in or-
der to distance himself from a perceived lack of deep and spiritual knowledge
in the everyday grind of his working life. McAlpine notes how in many of
Clare’s Northborough sonnets, “it can seem as though the landscape itself . . .
is seeing the scene and taking part in its own description” (90). By these
means, Clare intensifies his observation to the extent that he attempts to be-
come “thinged” by the flowers, birds, and grasses surrounding him; in other
words, nature is not “at bay” (McAlpine 79) but a source of nourishment,
solace, and refuge. To observe so closely that there is almost no distinction be-
tween what is seen and who is seeing—a process that can produce microscop-
ically descriptive poetry—reorders “things” in their importance. The “life”
of things becomes vital to Clare because he sees himself as part of “things”
in a natural world that both makes more sense to him and provides greater
“wonder,” as McAlpine acknowledges (79). Then again, Clare had been con-
structively criticized by his friend and fellow poet George Darley, as well as
his publisher John Taylor, for making poems that sometimes resembled lists,
only interesting to those who wanted the information (Bate 367–369).
32 Sue Edney
However, the intimacy displayed in many of Clare’s “nest” poems from
the late 1820s reminds us that there is an “animating presence” (Bate 369) in
these poems which includes nameable people as well as nonhuman nature.
Clare loved to walk by himself but he also enjoyed the company of his local
botanizing friends on field walks, such as Joseph Henderson and Edmund
Artis, and often included his beloved children. When in good health and
good company, Clare would wish to share his world with everyone who came
within his poetic or actual territory, to sing with them, talk, idle an hour
away, hunt for ferns, flowers, and shells. Yet the nightingale in “The Nightin-
gale’s Nest” “raised a plaintive note of danger nigh,” in “choaking fear” that
her song “might betray her home” (lines 58–61), a subtle allusion to Clare’s
exposed situation as a labouring-class poet. And in “The Yellowhammer’s
Nest,” just like a “noisome weed that burthens every soil” (line 24), so do
snakes enter Eden, “watch such nests & seize the helpless young . . . leaving a
housless-home a ruined nest” (lines 26–28). These poems skilfully combine
immediacy, drama, and literary knowledge with local detail and bird-lore,
yet underlying a descriptive nest poem is another related to Eden’s loss and
worldly misfortune. Home was always a threatened place for poor labour-
ers; the “housless-home” is terrifying for Clare, and a mark of subsistence
living, as Wordsworth noted at Tintern Abbey with its “vagrant dwellers in
the houseless woods” (line 21).
Wordsworth’s more enigmatic engagement with material nature is deter-
mined to find a place within the nonhuman world that he can call “home.”
His poetry “reflects a struggle to ground . . . imagining in an awareness
of the materiality of nature,” argues Onno Oerlemans, “the impenetrable
reality of surfaces and appearances” (35). In “The Tables Turned,” he adds
another dimension to “things,” urging his readers, to “Come forth into the
light” of them (line 15), an immersive approach to matter which may be in-
terpreted in the sense of weightlessness as well as brilliance. In “A slumber
did my spirit seal,” for example, human is reabsorbed into the landscape,
surmounting fear itself yet remaining witness to “earth’s diurnal course /
With rocks and stones and trees” (lines 7–8). The degree of wildness here,
which otherwise might go unnoticed, is in keeping with a project of “con-
templative ecopoetics” (Reclaiming Romanticism 24), as Kate Rigby terms
it, in which the earth’s diurnal course is a process of “thinging,” in Heide-
gger’s sense of “gathering”—things that are not rocks and stones and trees
but spirits (174–182). An attempt to penetrate surfaces and appearances of-
ten results in a distinct sense of unease, as Wordsworth’s almost obtuse bat-
tering creates uncanny manifestations rather than the real thing. In “We are
Seven,” the poet’s insistence on counting children rather than listening to the
story disturbs his confidence in facts, while the children are at home—those
under the grass by the house, alongside those above the grass where the
“little Maid” (line 29) sits, sews, and sings (lines 41–44). We are left with
the impression that Wordsworth’s acceptance of the child’s sums will even-
tually bring him more comfort than confusion.
 Wild freedom and careful wandering 33
David Simpson argues that Wordsworth developed a “poetic persona,”
the character of “long-distance wanderer across the hills and along the pub-
lic roads,” one of “exemplary loneliness,” in keeping with his status as poetic
witness to human and nonhuman encounter (54). It is a dangerous, uncom-
fortable position, in which “[m]otion itself becomes the governing principle,
as if the narrator is in a constant state of circulation, a man without home or
shelter and worldly destination, a figure of implacable homelessness” (Simp-
son 56). Yet his vision of home is regularly confirmed by going away—maybe
it can only be realized in expanding and contracting cycles of movement in
which “spots of time” (The Prelude XI.258) offer resting spaces.
Clare’s home in the nonhuman world, however, is the only one he knows
to be reliable, an earthly blessing that could provide for himself and his
family—bean fields, water-meadows, hay-making, sheep tending. All these
places and activities were integral to commons and heaths, and were part of
a community of nature, human and nonhuman combined. Clare’s material
involvements are not the “contemplative ecopoetics” (24) that Rigby applies
to Wordsworth’s encounters with things, whether physical or immaterial,
but touchstones of solidity, of stabilizing security in nonhuman everyday
reality. For both poets, their attempt to find a refuge in wildness is risky
because the vortex of material is not unifying, as Wordsworth would like
to persuade Nature to be, but constantly destabilizing. Clare is entangled
in matter; his poetry is “forged in relationships with other beings” (Kövesi
100), animal, vegetal, and mineral. Clare so levels his sights to the things
around him that he willingly blends his materiality with theirs, “hid in the
shadows of the meadow hay” with flies “brustling the rustling rushes” in
their delight (“A Flye,” lines 9, 6). He develops a poetry that permits him a
literary place he aspires to, which also allows poetic freedom to celebrate
pragmatic and poetic “wilding.” Clare’s re-creation of birds, plants, and an-
imals in poetic form rewilds them into a freedom he wished for himself: it is
a community of freedoms, combining nonhuman and human knowledges.
Rewilding his beloved landscapes allows a self-wilding of John Clare; he
becomes “Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers” (“The Mores,”
line 16). Yet Clare’s “wild” is also founded on that quality of mental and
physical freedom to choose that he needs to negotiate each day in order to
find some equanimity with his lack of choice. Wild beings have choices that
domestic ones do not; therefore, wildness is something to be cultivated—a
textual and material enigma.
In order to create his place in the written world, Clare needed to establish
a material world that tallied with the images projected by poets with greater
access to choice. His spatial constrictions appear to offer prospects of ac-
tual wildness that are unavailable to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey,
in spite of their surroundings in Somerset and the Lake District, because of
Clare’s particular involvement in a domestic as well as wild nonhuman land-
scape. Wild things include wild acts, especially when lack of freedom cre-
ates what might be called “break-out” impulses. When he was finally able to
34 Sue Edney
obtain a copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons, Clare became guilty of ap-
propriating civilized values and could only “go even further down the prim-
rose path, by making a literal, land trespass” over the wall of Burghley Park,
home of one of his eventual patrons, the Marquis of Exeter, as John Good-
ridge and R. K. R. Thornton have extensively discussed (16). They liken this
episode to Wordsworth’s boat-stealing transgression in childhood, depicted
in Book I of The Prelude: “It was an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure,”
yet formative, for “not without the voice / Of mountain-echoes did my Boat
move on” (lines 388–390). This was the same voice that Wordsworth heard
throughout his youth and growth into a poet with “Both pain and fear, un-
til we recognize / A grandeur in the beatings of the heart” (lines 440–441).
The paradox here is that while Wordsworth was confronted by elements
that might genuinely be considered part of the “wilderness” of Cumbria,
and his act was one of “wildness” in that it was an antisocial act, Clare is
trespassing into the establishment away from the very wildness he eulogizes.
His formative act is, indeed, transgressive, and the amount of manoeuvring
necessary to gain a copy of The Seasons demonstrates how working people
were effectively barred from gaining access to privileged texts. Clare bribed
another boy to tend the horses, and spent a working morning reading, in
someone else’s grounds—a “three-fold trespass on the time, culture and
land of his social superiors” (Goodridge and Thornton 13). Bribery, shirk-
ing, and trespass: these would be considered rebellious, wild acts, if Clare
had been caught.
Not only were there barriers to prevent theft of wild animals owned by
those with greater privilege—pheasants, rabbits, or deer—but the very pres-
ence of the labouring poor on what looked like wild land became an excuse
to harass anyone deemed out of place. Pain and fear were more immedi-
ately threatening for Clare: like the nightingale with “choaking fear,” he
had reason to be on his guard and silent. In Wittering Heath, another part
of the Marquis’s estate behind another wall, Clare was asleep after one of
his rambles, waking to hear the keepers and their dogs. Idleness was sus-
picious in a young labourer “and I shoud have been taken up as a poacher
undoubtedly” if they had chosen to do so, writes Clare (By Himself 100).
His “night walking” was “associate with the gipseys robbing the woods of
the hares and pheasants” because he “was often in their company,” as he
records in his “Autobiographical Fragments” (78). Clare represents them
as sharing the characteristics of the wildlife they depended on: secretive,
impulsive scavengers, always ready to move on. Their attraction was that
they “know the woods & every foxes den,” he writes, “the rabbits know them
& are almost tame” (“The gipsies,” lines 9, 12). Clare emulated and learned
from their fiddle-playing and envied their spirited, peripatetic ways of liv-
ing which were “tickling temptations to [his] fancy” (86). The potential for
licenced vagrancy appealed with that same sense that a child might wish
to join the circus. Being “ignorant in the ways of the world,” as Clare notes
in his “Autobiographical Fragments,” gives them a child-like charm; their
 Wild freedom and careful wandering 35
potential for “loose . . . morals” offered an enviable wildness (83), yet their
freedom was more imagined than actual in a regulated society.
In an early poem, Clare writes from the gipsy perspective: “The Gipseys
life is a merry life” in which they “live untythed & free” (“The Gipseys life,”
lines 1, 4). Later, in the asylum in Epping Forest, Clare writes with a dif-
ferent sense of what it is to be trapped in “The Gipsy Camp,” where the
man “seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow, / Beneath the oak, which
breaks away the wind” (lines 5–6). Clare is witness to their poor food and
meagre lives, yet lets them be the beings they are: “‘Tis thus they live—a
picture to the place; / A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race” (lines 13–14).
He makes ironical reference to their “picturesque” status, knowing that
“[t]he picturesque view of the gipsy camp was always from a distance.
Clare was the only English writer of the period to be entertained in a gipsy
camp, and he gives us insights from close quarters” (Lamont 24). Unlike
Wordsworth and William Cowper, who were both uncomfortable about the
apparently indolent nature of gipsy life, Clare knew what gipsies did at first
hand; they were fortune-tellers and horse-traders, itinerant field workers
and chair menders; they made and sold things. Objectified at arm’s length,
they were viewed as feral, like dogs and cats grown too wild to be admitted
to respectable homes, yet simultaneously dependant and suspicious. Sarah
Houghton-Walker notes how “unreadable” Cowper found the gipsy camp
he depicts in The Task (661); similarly, James Garrett comments on how
Wordsworth finds his “Gipsies” “uncounted and unaccountable” (619) in
his imaginative system (a little like the children in “We are Seven”). They are
an “unbroken knot” (line 1), unmoved by the light of things—whether by
the sun, “outshining like a visible God” (lines 13–15), or by the moon, who
“looks” at them but they “regard not her” (lines 20–21)—themselves lit only
by red fire, the “colouring of night” (line 6). That Clare had no difficulty in
“reading” gipsies is relevant in a culture that was still largely oral, especially
in Clare’s youth. His ambivalent tone through successive poems and prose
pieces on gipsy life—vacillating from “happy boys” (“The Gipseys life,”
line 2) to an “unprotected race” (“The Gipsy camp,” line 14)—shows how
these “natural allies,” as Goodridge and Thornton describe them (39), could
also be establishment enemies, his establishment being poetry. “Natural
allies” represents a good compression of the virtues Clare sought in non-
human Otherness: a togetherness that respected natural bounds and that
benefited from mutual education in nature’s mysteries. Dobbin the horse
learned his “tricks” (line 145) of trespass from the gipsies in “Going to the
fair,” and “felt no shame” (line 152), an example of “gipsies and animals
together finding paths to freedom” (Goodridge and Thornton 44). For es-
tablishment poets, though, gipsies were “wild things” of an uncanny order.
Their wandering habits affect Wordsworth and Clare with different levels of
anxiety; Clare could end up in prison for his own wandering, let alone for
spending time with other wanderers. Wordsworth fears that his wandering,
such as it is, will be taken for idleness, which might account for his persistent
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restoration of the tone and healthy nutrition of both nerve and
muscle. The current is to be sent along the line of the paretic nerve
and muscles for ten or fifteen minutes at a time and not less than
once a day.
 NEURALGIA.

Intermittent or remittent pains, in line of nerve without inflammation, or other

structural lesion. Diagnosis: lameness, stiffness of particular muscles having a
common nerve. Unnatural position habitual. Pain of inflammation and of
neuralgia. No functional change. Rheumatism. Tumors. Causes: lead, rheumatism,
gout, auto-poisons, cold, anæmia, reflex. Facial neuralgia, occipito-cervical, dorso-
intercostal, lumbo-abdominal, sciatic. Treatment: elimination, of lead, etc.;
intestinal antiseptics, tonics, hot water, anodynes, arsenic.

This is characterized by pain paroxysmal, intermittent or remittent

situated in the course of given nerves. It must be a pure neurosis and
unaccompanied by any specific structural lesion like inflammation,
degeneration, atrophy, hypertrophy, tumor or the like. It is therefore
manifested subjectively and cannot be easily identified in the lower
animals. Nevertheless, Lafosse, Zundel, Genée, and others have
recorded cases, their conclusion being deduced from symptoms
which were held to indicate nervous suffering in the absence of any
structural lesion whatever. A priori one can with difficulty escape the
conviction that neuralgia must exist in the lower animals as in man,
and the only drawback to its recognition is the difficulty of diagnosis.
The first step in such diagnosis must usually be the presence of
lameness, stiffness or indisposition to free movement of some
particular muscle or group of muscles deriving their innervation
from a particular nerve. Or there may be a particular position
habitually assumed such as semi-closed eyelids, drawn back ears,
laterally inclined neck which strongly suggests nervous suffering.
Next, there must be the exclusion of any appreciable structural cause
and especially of inflammation. The three prominent features of the
pain of inflammation is that it is aggravated by pressure, it is
heightened by movement, and it is accompanied by some decided
alteration of the function of the part. If there are at the same time
exudation and swelling, inflammation is all the more certainly
indicated. In a neuralgic pain on the contrary pressure does not
increase the pain: it may even alleviate it: movement of the part may
be rather satisfactory to the patient than painful; and the disturbance
of function, contractile, secretory, trophic, is not perceptible. There is
no local exudation nor swelling to account for the nervous disorder.
The liability to confound the affection with a neuritis more
centrally situated, but the pain of which is referred to the periphery
of the nerve, is to be obviated by a tracing of the nerve along its
course to the nerve centre so as to identify any centre of tenderness,
and also by the implication of all the peripheral branches coming off
ectal of that point.
Again, rheumatism may be easily confounded with neuralgia, but
here the affected nerve and muscle and even the skin over it is liable
to be very tender to the touch or pinch, and if at all acute some
hyperthermia is present. Like rheumatism, neuralgia shows a
tendency to shift from place to place.
Pains due to pressure on the nerves by tumors, aneurisms, and
other swellings, are constant, whereas neuralgic pains are marked by
remissions and aggravations and even by intervals of complete relief.
Causes. The toxic neuralgias are illustrated by chronic lead
poisoning, in which, in man, there are wandering pains like those of
rheumatism, and in the lower animals muscular stiffness and
contractions which suggest a similar condition. In man, too, gout is a
common factor, and in pigs and birds in which this condition exists,
stiffness and evidence of suffering may well be at times attributed to
a similar cause. How many other forms of chronic metallic poisoning
and poisoning by morbid autochthonous products of indigestion are
attended by disorders of innervation and nutrition, it is as yet
impossible to say. The direct action of cold, an anæmic condition of
the nerves, and reflex action from distant sources of irritation are
among the other invoked causes. Inflammation in the nervi
nervorum is also invoked as a factor, but in this case the symptoms
would not accord with the rule given above, since the nerve trunks
would be very tender to touch or pressure, and the suffering would
be unshifting and shown permanently in the one seat.
Facial Neuralgia. Lafosse and Zundel describe as cases of this
kind those in which periodically the horse’s eyes are fixed and
shining, the ears drawn back and depressed as in vice, the head at
intervals bent on the neck, with plaintive neighing, rubbing the head
on the stall and pawing. Those cases of twitching of the head or rapid
jerking of the ears in horses, when they have been driven for some
distance, and which are relieved by wearing a close net over the
nostril or by section of the trifacial nerve at the infra-orbital
foramen, manifestly partake of this character.
Cervico-Occipital Neuralgia. Lafosse speaks of this as often
mistaken for torticolis, the head being turned to the affected side
during the paroxysms. In man this is often a result of cold draughts
on the back of the head, and associated with tender points on the
course of the nerve, between the mastoid and the median line.
Dorso-intercostal neuralgia causes pain in deep inspiration,
and lumbo-abdominal neuralgia develops tenderness in the
loins, in one testicle, or in one lip of the vulva according to Lafosse.
Diagnosis between such cases and neuritis, spinal disease, and other
obscure nervous affections must be very problematical.
Sciatic Neuralgia. This is described by Zundel as causing jerking
and lameness in the affected limb, sometimes aggravated and
sometimes improved by work and associated with muscular
weakness or paresis. Sciatica in man is, however, rarely a simple
neuralgia, but partakes rather of the nature of a neuritis, and there is
no good reason for supposing that the disease of this nerve in the
lower animals is other than an inflammatory condition.
Leclainche after consideration of the testimony adduced, is of the
opinion that we still lack absolute evidence of uncomplicated
neuralgia in the domestic animals.
Treatment. For toxic cases elimination of the poison is the first
consideration. For lead carefully graduated doses of iodide of
potassium to carry off the offending agent without increasing its
poisonous action must be continued as long as the metal is passed by
the urine. It may be followed by a course of strychnia, by electricity,
massage and blisters. Gouty subjects may be treated with salicylate
of soda, alkalies, or colchicum. The victims of Bright’s disease must
be treated for the kidney affection.
Where there has been trouble of the digestive organs,
intestinal antiseptics (salol, sodium salicylate, bismuth-salicylate,
beta-naphthol) and small doses of arsenious acid will sometimes
benefit.
In anæmic conditions a course of tonics (cod liver oil, iron,
quinine, nux vomica) are indicated, and, to improve the local blood
supply, nitro-glycerine. A rich stimulating ration, currying, an open
air life, and sunshine (in summer a run at grass) are called for.
In man with a suspicion of traumatic origin, W. H. Thomson
strongly advocates a persevering use of the hot water douche to the
parts first affected, the hypodermic use of morphia and atropia, and
in case of local anæmia nitro-glycerine every three hours. Where
there is a suspicion of inflammation he successfully employs absolute
rest, with opium narcotism so as to abolish the pain, for twenty days
if necessary. Aconite, antipyrin, acetanilid, phenacetin, exaglin, and
gelsemium have their advocates, and may benefit in individual cases.
A course of arsenic is often successful, and phosphorus and ergot
have each proved of value.
 ATROPHY OF NERVES.

From arrest of function, from lesions, pressure, distal, but at times central of
lesion. Symptoms: Loss of function advancing to paralysis. Muscle atrophy.
Prognosis: in absence of incurable cause, is hopeful. Union of divided ends,
restoration of function. Treatment: time, ligature of divided ends.

This is usually the result of arrest of function. It may be due to

transverse section of the nerve, as in surgical neurectomy when the
separated peripheral end of the nerve gradually wastes. It may come
from contused wounds implicating the nerve and causing destruction
of its substance. It may be from tumors or other neoplasms pressing
on the trunk of the nerve and preventing the passage of nerve
currents. Or, inflammatory effusion may press on the nerve, as
happens often to the crural in hæmoglobinuria. Or the pressure may
come from enlarged mediastinal glands, or even from the distended
posterior aorta under habitual violent exertion so as to permanently
incapacitate and atrophy the left recurrent laryngeal nerve as in
chronic laryngeal paralysis (roaring). Similar wasting occurs in other
nerves under corresponding conditions. Atrophy may, however,
extend centrally from the peripheral end of a nerve when it can no
longer remain functionally active. We find an example of this in the
atrophy of the optic nerve up to the commissure when the eyeball has
been excised. A similar condition is often seen in horses in which the
integrity of the eye has been completely destroyed in connection with
recurring ophthalmia.
The symptoms attendant on atrophy of a nerve are those of
impaired function gradually advancing to complete paralysis of
motion or sensation. In cases of a complete breach of continuity as in
section or severe traumatism the entire loss of function necessarily
precedes the atrophy. Again, when it comes from destructive changes
in the coats and media of the eye, and of the ganglionic cells of the
retina, the atrophy of the nerve trunk proceeds simultaneously with
the lesions of the organ of vision.
The diagnosis will in many cases be easy as deduced from the
traumatic or surgical lesion. In other cases it may be made with
certainty from the complete muscular paralysis, wasting and
degeneration of the muscles supplied by the nerve, and by the history
of the case (hæmoglobinuria in atrophy of the triceps extensor cruris,
roaring in atrophy of the laryngeal muscles and recurrent nerve). In
other cases, as in the eye, we have the atrophy of the eyeball, the
distortion or complete paralysis of the iris, the opacity of the lens, or
the exudation into the vitreous, choroid and retina when these can
still be observed.
Prognosis will depend on the cause. With a nerve severed with a
knife or crushed in a part of its course and atrophied, without
destructive changes in the organs in which it is distributed, repair is
possible and to be expected in time.
Treatment is expectant, yet inflammation must be subdued,
tumors removed, divided ends ligatured, etc.
 DISEASES OF THE URINARY ORGANS.

Relative prevalence in man and animals. Causes of difference. Kidneys as

eliminating organs for nitrogenous material, toxins, bacteria, mineral, vegetable
and animal poisons, diuretic drinking water, condition powders, cantharides, urea,
etc. Suppression of urine, precipitation of urine. Filtration through kidney.
Secretion. Urinary solids. Nervous control of secretion. Excess.

Diseases of the urinary organs are less prevalent in the lower

animals than in man, owing largely no doubt to the greater simplicity
of their habits of life and to the comparative shortness of the lives of
those that are kept for meat producing. It is a mistake, however, to
suppose that they are so infrequent as would appear, since the
absence of subjective symptoms in the animal allows a number of the
milder forms of renal disease to be passed over without recognition.
In man the excessive consumption of animal food, the lack of
exercise, the abuse of alcohol, the prevalence of venereal diseases,
conduce largely to renal troubles, while animals in general escape.
Yet animals suffer much more extensively than is generally
supposed. The kidneys are, as in man, the eliminating organs for
superfluous and waste nitrogenous matter, and in overfed animals
may be overcharged with this work. They are the general
emunctories for the soluble poisonous products of bacteria and
plants, which may stimulate the urinary secretion, and from these
irritation may result. It is through the kidneys that the bacteria
themselves largely leave the animal body, and trouble is liable to
come during their passage. Further, exposure to cold tends to
increase the urinary secretion, over-stimulating the kidneys,
and the same may come from diuretic drinking waters and condition
powders, also from cantharides and other diuretic agents applied to
the skin. Urea and many toxins are diuretic, hence the occurrence of
polyuria at and after the crisis of fevers.
 On the other hand suppression of the urinary secretion may
occur in connection with profuse perspirations in hot weather, with
prolonged diarrhœa, or with privation of water, and in such cases the
liquid becomes concentrated and irritating and there is a disposition
to precipitate its solids under slight disturbing causes. As conducive
to such precipitation may be named foreign solid bodies, bacterial
ferments and probably the goitre poison since gravel and calculus are
common in goitrous regions.
There are two forms of elimination through the kidneys. 1,
filtration; 2, secretion.
1. Filtration is referred to the glomeruli, and is determined by the
relative blood pressure. Increase of pressure causes increase of
watery transudation. Digitalis increases heart action and arterial
pressure, and accidently urination. Excessive consumption of water
and watery liquids increases intravascular tension, and the amount
of urine.
2. Secretion is referred to the columnar epithelium of the
convoluted tubes. It is by the elective affinity or selective power of
this epithelium that the solids of the urine are abstracted from the
blood and passed into the urine. Crystals of uric acid have been
found in these cells and it is supposed that the abundance of water
furnished by the glomeruli, irrigating these convoluted tubes,
dissolves and washes on the various solids and other products with
which the epithelial cells are charged. The protoplasm of the cells
becomes saturated with the urea, uric acid, hippuric acid coloring
matter (indican, urochrome, etc.), and this is washed out, passing by
exosmosis to the liquid of lesser density with which the tubes are
filled.
 Nervous Control of Urinary Secretion.
An electric current through the renal plexus of the sympathetic
(vaso-motor) lessens, or suppresses urinary secretion (inhibition).
Cutting the nerves of this plexus causes excessive vaso-dilation,
renal pulsations synchronous with heart beats and arterial pulse, and
great increase of urine. A similar increase comes from the application
of cold to the surface, from fatigue, from heat exhaustion, from
irritation of the floor of the fourth ventricle just in front of the origin
of the vagus and from section of the splanchnic nerve. This last is,
however, much less marked and more transient than from section of
the renal nerve noted above; the latter causing dilation of the renal
vessels only, and increased pressure, whereas the former causes
dilation of the abdominal organs generally, diverting the blood
largely to other parts than the kidney and preventing the same
increase of pressure in the vessels of the latter. For the same reason
transverse section of the medulla oblongata, or of the spinal cord as
far back as the seventh cervical vertebra, lessens or interrupts the
urinary secretion, the pressure in the kidney being reduced by the
diversion of much of the blood elsewhere. This influence of the
nervous system on the urinary secretion seems to be mainly or
entirely one of increase or decrease of blood pressure in the kidney.
For this reason a weak heart tends to lessen urinary secretion.
Excessive increase of urine is only important when continuous
and in the absence of visible cause, such as diuretics.
 PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE URINE.

Color, yellow, red, brown; horse, ox, calf, sheep, goat, dog, cat, bird. In disease:
pale yellow, with water in excess; deep yellow, red, brown with solids in excess,
urobiline, biliverdin, hæmoglobin. Extraneous colors. Bilharzia. Translucency:
Turbidity: horse, ruminants, carnivora, pig. In disease, horse, other animals.
Consistency, viscous, stringy, tarry; odor, horse, dog, cat, ammoniacal, fœtid, drug
odor. Specific gravity, estimate of solids; reaction, acid, alkaline, neutral; morbid
chemical changes, sodium chloride, phosphate, alkaline, earthy, indican, urea, uric
acid, hippuric acid, phenol, creatinin, acetone, oxalic acid, allantoin, xanthin,
hypoxanthin, cyanuric acid, leucin, albumen, glucose, bile salts and pigments,
blood, hæmoglobin, epithelium, pus, casts.

Color. In estimating the color we must note the various shades of

yellow, red and brown and compare these with the normal in
different genera of animals, on different food and water, and in
different conditions of health. Grades of color may be stated as
follows:
Yellow: Pale, clear and deep yellows.
Red: Reddish yellow, yellowish red, and red.
Brown: Brownish red, reddish brown and brownish black.
Color of Normal Urine. This varies with the species of animal,
food, quantity of water drunk, and time of retention in the bladder.
Horse: Urine is normally clear yellow, brownish yellow, or deep
citron yellow, and the color is deepened by rich and abundant food
(excess of solids) and by exposure to the air (changes in pigments). It
may be sulphur white and sedimentary from precipitation of CaCO2
when on green food.
Ox, Calf, Sheep and Goat: Normal urine clear yellow to wine
yellow. In the ox especially it is a pale straw tint, but varies to a deep
brown on nitrogenous food (clover, peas, beans, cotton seed, lentils,
pea or bean straw). Color may be due to indican and sometimes to
indicanin or indigo blue, which explains the blue urine sometimes
described.
Dog: Normal urine is yellow, straw colored, aniline yellow, honey
yellow, to brownish yellow in hot season or on dry nitrogenous food.
Is always relatively deeper than in ruminants.
Cat: Straw yellow to honey yellow, with variation as in the dog.
Pig: Very pale yellow, more highly colored on dry feeding, nuts,
peas, etc.
Birds: White or yellow, sedimentary. Mixed with fæces in cloaca.
Color of Pathological Urine: Pale yellow with excessive
secretion glycosuria, polyuria, cryptogamic polyuria, chronic
interstitial nephritis, under diuretics, or after excessive drinking. The
free secretion of a crisis in a fever is pale yellow.
Deep yellow, deep red, deep brown color, indicates excess of
urinary pigment (urobiline) and is deepened by nitric acid. This is
seen in all hyperthermias with suppressed or diminished secretion,
in privation of water, or food. This urine is acid even in herbivora.
Yellow, saffron yellow, brownish yellow, greenish, olive,
or brownish red indicate the presence of bile pigments (biliverdin,
bilirubin) as in jaundice or cholyuria. Bile salts should be tested for.
A similar coloration may come from free consumption of carrots, or
other yellow pigmentary matters.
Red, brownish red, blood red, or deep brown color implies
the presence of blood or blood coloring matter in the urine
(hæmaturia, hæmoglobinuria). Exposed to the air this becomes
brown or chocolate in ratio with the amount of blood or blood
pigment present. Some such cases are complicated by blood clots.
Color due to Foreign Constituents.
Bronze or black color may come from injection of phenic
acid.
Deep green or olive green may come from tar, carbolic acid,
salol, creosote, or derivatives of benzine taken in.
Brownish green comes from thallin and reddens with iron
chloride.
Brown or blood red from rhubarb or senna.
Purple red from santonin, if alkaline (if acid, is reddish
yellow).
Red from madder (it is alleged from indigo).
Yellow from carrots.
Blue (indigo blue) may occur in urine of horse or ox when exposed
to the air.
Bluish green will come from feeding indigo.
White or yellow color will result from the presence of pus.
White, chylous urine occurs with a hæmatozöon (Bilharzia
Crassa) in the blood of cattle.
Translucency. Urine may be passed clear and become turbid by
standing. The presence of colloids hinders precipitation and prevents
clearing.
Horse: Urine is generally turbid, especially what has been long in
the bladder, and that which is last passed. The turbidity is largely due
to precipitation of calcium carbonate and bicarbonate, and increases
on green food, or if the liquid stands exposed to the air and is cooled.
Not unfrequently the salts are thrown down as fine spherical
granules, or there may be a white pultaceous mass. They are
sometimes entangled in extremely mobile cylindroid masses coming
from the uriniferous tubes during convalescence from fevers or
during fasting. A fine pellicle on the surface is normal in horse’s
urine left in the air.
 Ox, Sheep and Goat: Urine is passed clear. May become turbid
through the change of lime carbonate into bicarbonate in cattle but
always more slowly than in the horse.
Carnivora: Urine is passed clear but becomes turbid on
decomposition, or if concentrated. With excess of fat in the food it
may become opaque from floating oil globules, apart from the classic
chyluria.
Pig: Fed on raw fresh vegetables the urine is clear, but if on
cooked or dried vegetables, and especially if nitrogenous, it may
show opacity.
Pathological: The horse’s urine is limpid and acid in polyuria;
limpid and alkaline or neutral with modified phosphates. It may be
morbidly turbid from excess of lime phosphate or sulphate, urea or
other acid salts, exudates, leucocytes or pus. These usually indicate
nephritis. Mucus and muco-purulent exudate suggest pyelitis or
pelvic nephritis. Blood elements indicate nephritis, cystitis or
urethritis. Debris of kidney tissue may indicate tuberculosis; tumors,
etc.
Turbidity in other animals than solipeds is abnormal: examine
the urine.
Consistency of Urine. Morbid urine may be gluey, sizy, syrupy,
mucous, oily. If a horse’s urine is scanty a slight siziness may be
normal and due to tenacious mucus from the pelvis of the kidney,
and from the solution of mucin and epithelium in the alkaline fluid.
Viscous, sizy, stringy, and tarry (pitchy) urine is found in
pyelitis, pyelo-nephritis, or cystic catarrh, but not in polyuria owing
to the presence of the solvent acid.
Odor of Urine. This is somewhat aromatic in horse and ox,
disagreeable in the dog, and repulsively heavy in the cat. With
polyuria the odor is less. If the urine has been retained and
fermented it is ammoniacal, if there are ulcers or tumors it is
fœtid, in diabetes it smells of acetone, after taking turpentine it
has a violet odor, and after phenic acid, camphor, ether and other
drugs it is variously modified.
Specific Gravity of Urine in ratio to water 1000:
 Horse, 1020 to 1050 (1040)
Ox, 1025 „ 1045 (1030)
Sheep; Goat, 1015 „ 1065 (1040)
Dog, 1020 „ 1060 (1040)
Pig, 1005 „ 1015 (1010)
Cat, 1020 „ 1040 (1030)

In the horse the urine may be 1001 to 1010 in polyuria, in chronic

interstitial nephritis, and in a crisis of fever attended by diuresis. It
may be 1050 to 1060 in glycosuria. Undissolved solids that are
merely suspended in the urine do not affect its density.
A rough estimate of solids may be made by multiplying the last two
figures of a specific gravity expressed in four figures by 2.33. The
result approximates to the number of grammes of solids in 1000 cc.
Chemical Reaction of Urine. The liquid is tested by litmus
paper, red and blue, weakly impregnated. The normal reaction is
determined by the food: the urine of carnivora and sucking
herbivora is acid turning blue litmus red: the urine of vegetable
feeders is alkaline turning reds blue. In the horse the alkalinity is
mainly due to excess of lime bicarbonate, passing, with standing, into
lime carbonate, the carbon dioxide being derived from organic acids
(lactic, malic, citric, etc.), by oxidation. The hippurates are also
alkaline in reaction. In dogs the acidity is due to lime and soda
phosphates, sulphates, urates and oxalates.
Pathologically we find the urine strongly alkaline from the
evolution of ammonia from urea, in fermentations occurring with
prolonged retention in the bladder or in cystitis. The urine is acid
even in herbivora in all fevers in which appetite is lost or seriously
impaired, and in which the metabolism is excessive.
Chemical Changes in the Urine in Disease. Sodium
Chloride, is present in large amount in health (horse 25 to 35
grammes, dog 0.25 to 5 grammes daily) is diminished in fever,
anæmia, visceral and exudative inflammations. It is increased
during the absorption of false membranes and exudates. It is thrown
down by adding solution of nitrate of silver, the curdy white
precipitate being insoluble in nitric acid.
 Phosphates of lime, soda, potash and, scantily, of
magnesia are normally present (horse 0.08 to 0.60 gramme
phosphoric acid daily) and are present in excess in digestive
disorders and in malnutrition of bones (rachitis, osteoporosis and
rheumatoid arthritis). The alkaline phosphates are very soluble
and never precipitated. Earthy phosphates dissolve in acid urine,
but are precipitated from alkaline. To a little of the urine add a few
drops of acetic acid, followed by a few drops of uranium acetate. A
yellow precipitate of uranium and ammonium double phosphate is
thrown down.
Indican (C8H7NSO4) is formed from indol which passes
successively through the forms of indoxyle and indoxylid potassio-
sulphate. This is normally present in the urine, the horse excreting 1
to 2 grammes daily, the dog 0.15 gramme. It is present in excess in
intestinal indigestions, constituting indicanuria. It is tested by
adding a drop of muriatic acid and one of a solution of chloride of
lime to the urine, when it will show a blue ring, the depth of which
indicates the relative amount.
Urea (CON2H4) the principal waste product of nitrogenous
matter, is always present in considerable amount. The sound horse
may eliminate 100 to 200 grammes daily, the dog 5 to 180 grammes.
It is present in excess in all fevers and inflammations unless
urination is suspended or impaired, in cryptogamic diuresis, in
mellituria, uræmia, nephritis and cystitis. Test: The addition to a
filtered solution of urine, freed from phosphates, of solution of acid
nitrate of mercury, precipitates it as nitrate of urea. A simpler test is
to add to a drop or two of urine on a glass slide a drop of nitric acid
and heat gently. The nitrate of urea is precipitated in the
characteristic rhombic or hexagonal crystals as seen under the
microscope. Heat urea crystals in a test tube: biuret is formed and
ammonia escapes. Add a trace of a copper sulphate solution and a
few drops of a 20 per cent. solution of caustic potash: a rose-red
color is produced—the biuret reaction.
Uric Acid (C5H4N4O3). Traces only of this are found in the
normal herbivorous urine, yet it is more abundant when on a full dry
grain diet, on milk (suckling) or on animal food. The dog kept on
animal food has a large amount.
 Pathologically it is produced in the dog and even in the horse in
fever, overwork and starvation, the animal living on his own tissues.
Interference with oxidation in the lungs seems to produce it as an
arrest in the transformation of albuminoids to urea. The neutral
urate of soda remains in solution: the acid urate of soda is
precipitated. Test: To the urine add one-fourth its volume of muriatic
acid and set aside for 24 hours in a cool place. On the bottom and
sides of the glass and on the surface of the liquid will be found the
yellowish red acicular crystals of uric acid.
Hippuric Acid (C9H9NO3) is normally present in all urine, but is
especially abundant in that of herbivora. The horse eliminates 60 to
160 grammes daily. It has been found to be increased by feeding on
dandelion, carrots, clover, asparagus, apples, plums, benzoic acid, oil
of bitter almonds, toluol, cinnamic or kinic acid. It is absent in
sucking calves, and horses fed on grain devoid of husk.
Pathologically it is increased in hyperthermia, icterus, some liver
diseases and diseased kidneys. Test: Precipitate any albumen by
nitric acid and boiling, then add hydrochloric acid which precipitates
the hippuric acid in long needle-like crystals. Heated in a small glass
tube it forms an oily liquid, and heated to redness gives off an odor of
hydrocyanic acid (nitro-benzol) and carbon is left. This distinguishes
alike from uric acid and benzoic.
Phenol is produced by intestinal fermentation. The horse
normally excretes about 3 grammes daily. Pathologically it appears
in excess in indigestions, abscesses, softened discharging tubercle,
pyæmia, and septicæmia. Test: Dilute solutions of ferric salts give a
blue coloration.
Creatinin, a product of metabolism of albuminoids, is found
especially in the urine of carnivora and omnivora in health. It is
pathologically increased when oxidation is interfered with, as in
diseases of the lungs. Test: Add to the urine a very dilute solution of
sodium nitro-prusside and then drop by drop some solution of
caustic soda, when a ruby red color is shown and disappears again on
boiling. Acetic acid changes to blue.
Acetone (C3 H6 O) is found in the urine of healthy omnivora and
carnivora and increased by excess of nitrogenous food. Pathologically
it has been found in fevers with much blood change, in inanition, in
cancer, in indigestions, and auto-intoxications. Test: To several c c.
of urine add a few drops of iodo-potassic iodide solution and caustic
potash when iodoform will be abundantly precipitated with its
characteristic color and odor.
Oxalic Acid (C2 H2 O4) appears to be secreted in small amount by
healthy kidneys and it may also come from the splitting up of uric
acid after secretion. It is augmented by feeding agents rich in oxalic
acid (beets, fresh beans, asparagus, tomatoes). Pathologically it
abounds in certain indigestions, and is associated with lameness and
emaciation. Test: Add lime water to the urine, and the white oxalate
of lime is precipitated.
Allantoin (C4H6N4O3) is found in the urine of sucklings (calves)
during the first few weeks of life, in pregnancy and when on a meat
diet. It diminishes with the increase of vegetable food.
Xanthin (C5H4N4O2) is found in urine as a result of imperfect
oxidation of nitrogenous matters especially, which would otherwise
pass into uric or hippuric acid. Its immediate antecedents in such
transformation are guanin and hypoxanthin or sarkin. It is a rare
constituent of urinary calculus.
Hypoxanthin (C5H4N4O) is produced from fibrine in gastric and
pancreatic digestion and in putrefaction, and is especially abundant
in leucæmic subjects.
Cyanuric Acid (C20H14N2O6) occurs in dog’s urine.
Leucin (C6H13NO2) and Tyrosin (C9H11NO3) are products of
pancreatic digestion of proteids, and the former occurs normally in
the spleen, thymus, thyroid, liver, salivary glands, and urine. Both
are present in large amount, in the urine, in acute atrophy of the
liver. Test for leucin: Evaporate carefully to dryness with nitric acid:
the residue, if leucin, will be almost transparent and turn yellow or
brown on the addition of caustic soda. If now heated with the soda it
forms an oily drop. Test for tyrosin: treated with strong sulphuric
acid, gently warmed and chloride of iron added, it gives a violet
color.
Albumen is an important morbid constituent of urine, which
appears in a great variety of diseases (nephritis, pneumonia,
epilepsy, anæmia, leucæmia, diabetes, hæmaturia, hæmoglobinuria,
hydræmia, infectious lung diseases, cardiac obstruction, venous
stasis in the kidney, dermatitis, burns, lesions of the crura cerebri,
floor of the fourth ventricle, spinal cord, or renal vaso-motor nerves).
It also occurs after violent exertion, in poisoning by strong acid,
phosphorus, arsenic, lead, mercury, opium or alcohol, and when an
excess of albumen is injected into the blood. All forms of albumen
may enter the urine, but the most common are serum albumen,
globulin of serum, propeptone and peptone. A simple test is to
acidulate the urine with acetic acid and boil: if the precipitate does
not dissolve on addition of nitric acid, it is albumen. Sulphosalicylic
acid added to the urine will cause a precipitate in urine containing
only ¹⁄₅₀₀₀₀ of albumen.
Glucose (C6H12O6) is often normally present for a short period in
small amount after a full meal of farinaceous material. It is
permanently present in excess in glycosuria, which may result,
among other conditions, from diseased liver, punctured medulla,
suppression of milk secretion on weaning the calf, oil of turpentine,
nitrobenzole, nitrotoluol or amyle nitrate. Test: Add yeast to the
urine and keep at 15° to 20° C. when if glucose is present, it becomes
cloudy and gives off carbon dioxide, or add a little caustic potash
solution, and a few drops of cupric sulphate solution until it is blue:
then heat and a red precipitate of cupreous oxide is thrown down.
The amount gives the ratio of glucose. Uric acid, hypoxanthin or
mucus causes brown precipitate in the absence of glucose: peptone,
creatin, creatinine, pepsine and urinary pigment prevent its
formation though glucose be present.
Bile Salts and Pigments are present in excess in cases of
icterus, where these characters may be studied. See Icterus.
Blood and Hæmoglobin in Urine. In a variety of diseases
(anthrax, hæmaturia, nephritis, Texas fever, hæmoglobinuria, etc.)
blood or blood coloring matter escapes in the urine. When blood
escapes one finds the reddish color, and under the microscope red
globules, normal or crenated (especially in alkaline urine), free,
aggregated in masses, in small clots, or embedded in casts of the
uriniferous tubes. Under the spectroscope the spectrum shows two
dark absorption bands, one in the yellow and one in the green. When
the color is due to hæmoglobin the urine shows under the
microscope numerous masses of amorphous brown pigment, and the
spectrum shows one dark line in the yellow, and three others less
deep, (but one of them very broad) on the limit of the green and blue.
Urine which contains the elements of blood is usually turbid and
thick or glairy, by reason of the presence of salts, albumen and
fibrine. There may also be crystals of urinary salts (calculi),
fragments of broken down tissue (tumors) or the ova of worms.
Epithelium in Urine. The slight cloud seen in healthy urine
contains epithelial cells. The source of these may be often
determined under the microscope. The bladder epithelium are the
most numerous, the largest, and are squamous. Those from the
ureters and renal pelvis are also squamous, but neither so large nor
so numerous. The epithelium from the uriniferous tubules are
polyhedral with large nucleus or columnar. The cells from the male
urethra are also largely columnar. In cases, however, in which these
cells are passed in large amount because of catarrh of the mucosa all
alike tend to assume the globular form with large nucleus so that
their true source cannot be certainly stated. It is only from such cells
as have become detached without change of form that the seat of
desquamation can be determined. If an excess of cells approximating
to the kidney type are associated with albuminuria and cylindroid
casts they become diagnostically significant. Polygonal cells darkly
granular with large oval nucleus and nucleolus suggest kidney
inflammation. If the granules are freely soluble in ether there is
probably fatty degeneration. If hard, tough and glossy they suggest
(but don’t prove) amyloid degeneration.
Pus Cells in Urine. Pus cells, with multiple nuclei revealed by
adding dilute acetic acid, may be found in small numbers in
apparently healthy urine. When present in large numbers, they
usually indicate a catarrhal affection of the mucosa, and especially
pyelitis, cystitis, or urethritis. There is always cloudiness, excess of
mucin, and, in the alkaline herbivorous urine, the liquid may be
glairy or stringy.
Casts of the Uriniferous Tubes. These usually indicate the
existence of nephritis, yet they may be present in small numbers in
the urine of healthy individuals under a slight toxic action such as
alcohol.
Unorganized casts of urinary salts or hæmatoidin found in
sucklings appear to have no pathological significance. Organized
casts, on the other hand, usually imply renal troubles, and especially
inflammation. As these will be fully described under Bright’s disease,
it need only be noted here that they may be composed in great part of
red globules, leucocytes, epithelium, bacteria, granules, a
homogeneous wax-like matter, fat globules, hyaline matter, or
urinary salts. The predominance of one or other of these determines
the nature of the cast.
The observations of Mayer, Knoll, Bovida, Von Jaksch and others
seem to show that the basis substance of urinary casts differs from all
our familiar proteids and must be considered as a distinct
nitrogenous compound, a derivative of one of the common proteids.
 GENERAL SYMPTOMS OF URINARY DISEASE.

External symptoms, arched back, stiff gait, straining, tender loins, backing,
turning, dropping under weight, urine checked, dribbled; in dogs and cats,
palpation of kidney; bladder, urethra, pains in different animals. Internal
symptoms, rectal exploration, vaginal, urethral, straining, ureters, bladder, calculi,
neoplasms, prostate, urethritis.

External Symptoms. With inflammatory or painful affections of

the urinary organs the animal tends to roach the back or loins, tuck
up the abdomen, move the hind limbs stiffly and with a straddling
gait, protract and withdraw the penis which may be semi-erect,
retract and drop the testicles alternately, and stretch himself and
strain to pass urine without success. Lying down and rising may be
accomplished with marked effort and groaning. The loins along the
spines or beneath the outer ends of the transverse processes may
prove tender to tapping or pinching, the animal drooping to excess.
Backing or turning in a narrow circle may be accomplished
awkwardly and stiffly though usually more easily than with lumbar
sprain. The animal drops when mounted but less than with sprained
back. Urine may be passed in excess or in diminished amount, or it
may be entirely suppressed. It may be abruptly interrupted when in
full stream, suggesting calculus or polypus, or it may be passed often
in mere dribblets, or finally it may ooze away constantly partly
lodging in the sheath and partly trickling down the thighs.
In dogs or cats with flaccid walls of the abdomen external
manipulation may detect in the kidneys, differences in size, position,
and tenderness as well as the presence of tumors. The distended
bladder also may be distinctly felt, and the pyriform area of flatness
on percussion will serve to map out its size and outline.
 In the horse the urethra is superficial and easily traced over the
ischiatic arch and for some distance downward, when it becomes
deeper and is less easily felt. In the bull the urethra is deep over the
ischiatic arch but becomes more superficial lower down and can be
easily felt at the sigmoid flexure and below. In sheep and dog it is
easily followed from the ischium to the end of the penis.
As a rule the penis is easily drawn from its sheath in the horse and
dog; this is more difficult in the sheep and goat and still more so in
the bull and boar. In the small animal protrusion is favored by
setting him on his rump, with his back between the operator’s legs,
and the pelvis doubled forward toward the sternum. The penis of the
bull may be extended in presence of a cow in heat, and promptly
seized, or it may be seized through the sheath back of its first bulging
part and skillfully worked out. In the ruminant, calculi may be felt at
the sigmoid curve, and in the ram, in the vermiform appendix at the
fore end of the penis.
Internal Exploration. This is accomplished in the larger
animals with the oiled hand in the rectum, the nails having been
pared short and even to avoid injury to the mucosa. In ponies and
yearlings the kidney may be felt, and this may be true also of mature
animals of larger species in cases of hypertrophy or floating kidney.
The ureters, bladder and intrapelvic urethra are easily felt in the
male. The empty bladder lies on the anterior border of the pelvis;
when full, it projects forward into the abdomen but retains its
pyriform or, in the very young animal, its fusiform shape. In the
female the sensation is somewhat modified by the presence on its
upper surface of the uterus dividing into its two horns anteriorly. The
single enlarged horn of pregnancy is especially misleading.
The female urethra, cervix and bladder may be explored through
the vagina. To explore the cervix vesicæ and urethra the fingers are
slowly drawn back from the bladder along the median line of the
floor of the vagina. In the mare the cervix and adjacent portion of the
bladder can be further explored with the index finger introduced
through the opening of the urethra in the floor of the pelvis and at
the junction of the vagina and vulva. In the cow the urethra is too
small to be readily explored from within, and the orifice is still
further guarded by the two lateral blind canals of Gærtner, into
which the unskilled fingers more readily pass. Success only attends
the careful search for the small central lower orifice. In the smaller
animals the finger only can be introduced into vagina or rectum and
the urethra, cervix and bladder only can be felt. The result of such
exploration is straining even in healthy conditions but which
becomes excessive in nephritis, pyelitis, renal, urethral, vesical or
urethral calculus, cystitis, rectitis or enteritis.
The ureters are tender when inflamed, and they are swollen in
calculus obstruction with an elastic feeling in front of the stone.
The bladder is very sensitive when overdistended, inflamed or
pendent on the abdominal floor, or when the seat of calculus. In the
absence of any liquid contents a calculus is felt as a hard solid mass
firmly clasped by the contracted vesical walls. If liquid is present the
solid hard calculus is felt movable in the fluid. An empty contracted
bladder is firm and pyriform. An empty flaccid bladder, resulting
from rupture or exhaustion, is flabby, with indefinite form and, if the
seat of a lesion, tender. It varies in consistency with neoplasms
(papilloma, sarcoma, carcinoma, or epithelioma). These have not the
free mobility of the calculus floating in urine, and their point of
connection with the wall may often be made out. When a solid body
is felt, or suspected to be in the contracted bladder, an injection of
sterilized water will usually facilitate diagnosis, and a differentiation
of calculus and neoplasm.
Hypertrophy of the prostate is felt as a swelling of uneven outline
over the cervix vesicæ. It is to be looked for especially in old dogs.
Urethritis is indicated by swelling and tenderness along the
median line of the pelvic floor, back of the cervix. With a calculus in
the urethra the swelling is more strictly localized and the canal in
front of it may be full and elastic.
 HEMATURIA.

Symptoms of different lesions of kidneys and constitutional states, of poisoning

by irritant plants, common on moors and in woods. In puerperal cow fed on
turnips raised on mucky, unreclaimed, sour lands. Bacteria. Toxins. Anæmia. Poor
wintering. Limed new soils. Symptoms: in plethoric, congested mucosæ, vascular
tension, hurried breathing, colics, straining, red urine; in vegetable irritants,
depression, weakness, coldness, trembling, stiffness behind, scanty red or black
urine, diarrhœa, constipation; in anæmia, poverty, debility, red urine, pink tinge in
milk, emaciation, hidebound, anorexia, colics. Chronic or intermittent. Lesions: in
plethoric, congested enlarged kidney, without softening; in irritant poisons,
congestion also of throat, stomachs, intestines, liver with hæmorrhagic
extravasations; in anæmia, kidneys pale, flaccid, hydroæmia, liver enlarged,
softened, reddish liquids in serous cavities. Treatment: avoid the injurious soils,
drain, cultivate, feed products of such soils with other food, oleaginous or saline
laxatives, antiferments, tonics, astringents, flax seed, farinas.

The passage of blood or blood elements in the urine.

Causes. A symptom of a variety of diseases, producing lesions of
the secreting structures of the kidneys; acute congestion, tumors,
calculi, parasitism. Also as a manifestation of diseases of distant
organs—hæmoglobinuria, southern cattle fever, anthrax, poisoning
by irritant diuretics, wounds of the bladder, pelvic fracture with
injury to bladder or urethra, cystitis with varicose cystic veins, etc.
Among the irritant plants charged with producing the affection are
the young shoots of oak, ash, privet, hornbeam, alder, hazel,
dogberry, pine, fir, and coniferæ, generally. Also ranunculus,
hellebore, colchicum, mercuriales annuus, asclepias vincetoxicum,
broom, etc. The disease is common in spring in cattle turned out too
early to get good pasturage and which, it is alleged, take to eating the
swelling buds and young shoots of irritant plants.
 The disease has occurred mostly in woods and wild lands and has
accordingly been vulgarly named the wood evil, (maladie de bois,
holzkrankheit), and moor ill.
In England, as occurring in the puerperal cow, Cuming, of Ellon,
attributes it to a too exclusive diet of turnips. His analysis showed
that turnips contained 10% sugar and 1 to 1½% vegetable albumen.
The sugar is held to stimulate unduly the milk secretion, but fails to
supply the nitrogenous materials needful to form it, and the cow is
speedily rendered anæmic, with solution of the blood globules or of
the hæmatin and its excretion by the urine. No attempt was made to
produce hæmaturia by an exclusive or excessive diet of sugar, and
cows fed on turnips grown on well drained lands never suffered from
the disease.
Williams says that urine in such cases had a strong odor of rotten
turnips. This argues not an anæmia determined by sugar, but rather
an intestinal fermentation, perhaps superinduced by ferments
introduced along with the turnips. Add to this the notorious fact that
the offending turnips are usually such as are grown on wild, damp,
undrained, swampy, or mucky lands, and we have the suggestion of a
bacteridian poison, or a toxic product of bacteria. Williams and
Reynal practically agree on the point that the common hæmaturia is
the result of anæmia. It has long been noticed that the herds which
suffer from the affection are those which have come out of the winter
in low condition, the victim is the poor man’s cow, and the symptoms
are most likely to appear when turned into the fields in spring before
the pastures have come up. The anæmic condition of the carcasses is
quoted in support of this view, but perhaps without making sufficient
account of the extraordinary destruction of blood globules during the
progress of the malady.
Pichon and Sinoir see in the liming of soils and the production of
larger crops, a cause of anæmia in the rank and aqueous growth of
the meadows, and their overstocking in order to eat them down, or to
consume their products. They found that an abundant artificial
feeding was the most efficacious mode of treatment.
Reynal, who endorses this view, tells us that in the anæmic and
liquid blood the globules become smaller and can pass more readily
through the walls of the vessels. But this is exactly the opposite effect
from what we see when the blood is diluted with water. The globules
in such a case are distended and enlarged, and may finally have their
protoplasm and hæmatin dissolved and diffused through the liquid.
If the blood globules are shrunken, then we must look for a cause
very different from anæmia.
Reynal further assures us that plethora is a common cause of
hæmaturia in cattle. “Under the prolonged influence of a very
assimilable diet, the blood becomes more plastic, circulates with
difficulty in the capillaries, and may even rupture them, with a
resulting capillary renal hæmorrhage, and bloody urine.” He further
intimates that this occurs especially in spring after the animals have
been turned out on very rich pastures, and that in Normandy certain
pastures of unusual richness are notorious for producing hæmaturia.
Apart from the fact that the rich grasses of spring produce at first
intestinal congestion, and diarrhœa, with consequent disorder of the
liver and kidneys, this spring affection on particular pastures
suggests some special poison in the pasture as the unknown cause of
the disease.
In all forms alike of this affection the nature of the soil appears to
have a preponderating influence. It is the disease of the woods, and
waste lands, of damp and undrained lands, of dense clays, of lands
underlaid by clay or hard pan, of lands rich in vegetable humus, or
vegetable moulds the decomposition of which has been hastened by
the application of quicklime.
Pottier, Salomé, Wiener, and Reynal especially testify to the
prevalence of hæmaturia on soils that are either dense and
impermeable, or that have a subsoil of clay or hardpan.
The disease has not been traced to any definite microbe nor toxin,
but there is much to suggest the necessity for inquiry in that line. The
special susceptibility of animals that may be plethoric on the one
hand, or in low condition on the other, would be entirely in keeping
with such a view, as the debility or derangement of health would lay
the system open to attack.
Symptoms. In the plethoric animal there are congested mucosæ,
full, strong pulse, forcible heartbeats, full veins, accelerated
breathing, colicy pains, dullness, straining frequently and the
discharge of thick, red or bloody urine.
 If from irritant buds and shoots, or plants, there is more
depression, weakness, fever, dry skin, staring coat, coldness of the
surface, tremblings, stiffness or weakness of the hind limbs,
diarrhœa, followed by constipation, frequent straining and the
passage of colored urine with pain. In violent cases the expulsion of
bloody urine may be excessive, and the cow may die in 24 hours.
From irritant plants however the quantity of urine is liable to be
small, but frequently passed.
As occurring irrespective of plethora or irritants there may be at
first only poor condition and debility with the passage of blood. A
pink tinge may show on the froth in the milk pail, and a red
precipitate on its bottom. If not anæmic at the outset they soon
become so, and the pulse which was at first bounding becomes small
and weak, the heart palpitates, the red mucosæ become pale. The
subjects become tucked up, emaciated, weak, rough coated, the skin
adherent to the bones, and the appetite and rumination impaired or
lost. Sometimes colics are present.
In the milder anæmic forms it may continue for months before it
causes death. In such cases it may prove intermittent.
Morbid Anatomy. In the hæmaturia of plethora the kidneys are
large, congested and of a dark red, but, preserve their normal
consistency and texture.
In the form associated with ingestion of irritant plants, there is
congestion of the pharynx, stomachs, and intestines with
hæmorrhagic spots, congestion of the liver, violent congestion of the
kidneys which are of a blackish red color, and enlarged to perhaps
twice the normal size, with hæmorrhagic exudations, the convoluted
tubes filled with fibrinous exudate and blood globules, the pelvis red
and like the bladder containing some reddish urine. The vesical
mucosa may be black.
In anæmic cases the kidneys are pale, flaccid and colorless, with a
reddish liquid in the pelvis and bladder. The vascular system is
comparatively empty, and the blood, thin, and watery, and often
coagulates loosely or not at all. As noted by Herland globules are
greatly reduced in numbers and size, and often crenated or partially
broken down. Slight serous effusions in the serous membranes are
common. The liver is softened and enlarged, the lacteals have
reddish contents, and the ingesta are dark colored.
 Treatment. Preventive. Avoid hæmaturia pastures and the fodder
grown on such lands. Drain and cultivate such soils. When animals
must feed on the products of such soils supplement the food by
grain, oil cake, cotton seed meal, etc. Avoid stagnant waters draining
from such soils.
Therapeutic Treatment. Give oleaginous or saline laxative to clear
out poisons and ferments from the bowels and may add an
antiferment (salol, salicylic acid, carbolic acid, turpentine oil,
chlorate of potash, sulphites or hyposulphites), no matter if diarrhœa
is present. Follow with tonics (copperas, chloride of iron) and
stimulant antiseptics (ol. terebinth, potass. chlorate), and sound
food. Flax seed, linseed meal, farinas. Bitters may be added (gentian,
quinine, quassia). As a calmative, camphor (2 to 4 drs.) 2 or 3 times a
day has proved useful.
In case of nephritis treat as for that affection.
Weiner lauds empyreumatic oil and oil of turpentine with
camphor.
In chronic cases, nourishing food with change of locality and water
are very important.
A course of iron tonics should wind up the treatment.
 ACUTE CONGESTION OF THE KIDNEYS IN
SOLIPEDS.

Definition. Causes: bacteria, toxins, irritant diuretics, musty oats or fodder, foul
water, cantharides, turpentine, aqueous grasses, onions, moulting, cold, chills,
injuries to loins, over-driving. Lesions: kidney enlarged, red, black, softened,
capsule loose, cut surface drops blood, brown, softened necrosed areas, gorged
capillaries of glomeruli and convoluted tubes, granular or fatty changes in
epithelium, may be ruptures. Symptoms: sudden; weak tender loins, slow dragging
straddling gait, accelerated pulse and breathing, anxious countenance, colics,
sweating, urine from limpid to black, with red globules, and casts. Prompt recovery
or nephritis. Diagnosis: from nephritis, hæmoglobinuria, laminitis, indigestion.
Prevention: Treatment: bleeding, laxatives, diffusible stimulant diuretics,
bromides, diluents, mucilaginous agents, fomentations, sinapisms, rectal
injections, clothing, friction to the skin, restricted laxative diet.

Definition. Active congestion of the renal capillaries, especially of

those of the glomeruli and convoluted tubes, with colicy pains, and
free discharge of urine, in some cases bloodstained.
Causes. It may be determined by local irritation caused by the
passage of the bacteria and toxins of infectious diseases such as
influenza or contagious pneumonia. In the same way irritant
diuretics, medicinal, alimentary and toxic, operate. Diuretic balls and
condition powders given recklessly by stablemen and grooms,
saltpeter, resin, oleo resins, turpentine, rue, savin, colchicum, squill,
anemone nemorosa, adonis, cynanchum vincetoxicum and other
species of ascelepias, hellebore, mercurialis annua and bryony are
examples. The young shoots of the coniferous plants, fir, balsam fir,
pine, white and yellow, and hemlock, are at times injurious.
In the same way, damp moldy oats or fodder produce renal
congestion and excessive polyuria, also corrupt, stagnant water and
that of marshes which often contains complex toxic products of