Chapter VII: General Summary (1)

During the period from Waller to Pope the general feeling toward Nature was one of indifference. The whole emphasis was on man in his higher social relations, and only such parts of Nature as were easily subordinated to man were looked upon with pleasure. The facts of Nature were little known. They were stated in terms merely imitative and conventional. The new feeling toward Nature, as exemplified in the early nineteenth-century poets, especially Wordsworth, on the contrary, is marked by full and first-hand observation, by a rich, sensuous delight in form, color, sound, and motion; by a strong preference for the wilder, freer forms of Nature’s life, by an enthusiasm for Nature passionate in its intensity, by a recognition of the divine life in Nature, and finally by a consciousness of the inter-penetration of that life and the life of man. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in poetry, travels, fiction, painting, and gardens, it was the classical feeling toward Nature that predominated. By the end of the century the new feeling had found abundant, varied, and original statement. The change is a great one. From Pope to Wordsworth, from Le Nôtre to Repton, from Kneller to Turner, from Richardson to Mrs. Radcliffe, from Brand to Gilpin, the pendulum swings. Whether men painted pictures or made gardens, or went on journeys, or told tales of love and adventure, or wrote poems, the new spirit was at work within them, sending them forth into the world of Nature and bidding them bear witness to her power and loveliness.

Early manifestations of the new spirit did not, however, find exactly contemporaneous expression in these various art-forms. Thomson’s “Seasons” and Pope’s “Fourth Epistle” are in 1726–31. Gainsborough and Wilson do not bring out their work until after 1755. Thomas Amory’s “John Buncle” is in 1756–66, and Brown’s “Keswick Letter” comes within the same period. Thus the decisive beginnings of the new spirit in painting, fiction, and travels are about contemporary, but are thirty years behind poetry and gardening. Furthermore, the time between the decisive beginnings and the final full expression is greatly varied. In poetry it is seventy-three years, in gardening about sixty-five, in painting about fifty, in fiction not over twenty-five, and in travels only about fifteen years.

In spite of these variations in date there seems to be in each art the same general order of development. First there is a dim period of tentative, unconscious, or apologetic indications of a new spirit. Then some original mind seizes upon the new idea and gives it consistency and at least partially adequate expression. After this there follows a period of less vigorous but widespread and varied efforts to find a statement for some portions of the new thought. Then a master mind seems to feel all these diffused, struggling, half-expressed conceptions and sums them up in the final perfect form. In the poetry of Nature these stages are clearly marked in the work before Thomson, in Thomson, in the period from Thomson to Wordsworth, and in Wordsworth. In painting are Wilson and Gainsborough on the one hand and Turner on the other. In gardening, travels, and fiction we find the periods marked respectively by Kent and Repton, Brown and Gilpin, Amory and Mrs. Radcliffe. In these three art-forms, especially in the last two, we do not find the period of development ending in the work of consummate genius. We go rather from a meager statement to a statement that is full, manysided, enthusiastic. The progress is in the love of Nature rather than in the power of adequate, final expression. The development in gardening is more in the nature of a series of experiments open to wide discussion, and the final outcome takes the form given it by the man whose study of past failures and successes has led him to the surest comprehension of the artistic and mechanical laws involved. A glance at the accompanying table will make the general statement clear, the main point being that in at least five of the ways in which men express their ideas it is possible to trace the growth of a complete change of attitude toward Nature. The poets who helped to bring about this change have already been studied in detail, but some further general statements may not be out of place here.

As a rule, such significant poetry of Nature as appeared during the transition period was the work of men who had spent much of their youth in the country or in country villages; it was practically their earliest poetic venture, and usually the work of their youth; and, in most cases where there was an extended literary career, the poetry of Nature speedily gave way to work of a didactic or dramatic sort, in which Nature played but a small part. To any such general statement there would be of course important exceptions. Blake, for instance, was a town-bred poet. So was Collins, and his “Ode to Evening” is not his earliest work. Cowper was town-bred. He was old when he began to write, and his poetry of Nature is his latest rather than his earliest work. But, taken as a whole, the poetry of Nature during the eighteenth century bears out the statement as made. It is well illustrated by Armstrong, who was born and who apparently spent his youth in Castleton, a little village in the wildest part of the mountainous country around the Derbyshire peaks, wrote his “Winter” before he was fifteen, went to Edinburgh and then to London to study, and wrote as the work of his mature years a didactic poem on the “Art of Preserving Health.” Or by Dyer, who was brought up in South Wales, wrote “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk” at twenty-five, went up to London, and wrote as his mature work “The Ruins of Rome” and “The Fleece.” Or by Thomson, who lived until he was fifteen in Southdean, a little hamlet at the foot of the Cheviot Hills, the last of whose “Seasons” appeared when he was thirty and whose later work was a succession of dreary tragedies. Or by Akenside, who, though brought up in Newcastle-on-Tyne, made frequent visits to the country during his youth, wrote “The Pleasures of the Imagination” at seventeen during one of these visits, and in his after life wrote much prose and poetry in which there is no hint of the early enthusiasm. Allan Ramsay lived in a secluded spot among the Pentland Hills until he was fifteen, and his earliest important poem, “The Gentle Shepherd,” is really a memory picture. William Pattison spent his youth at Appleby, a village on the Eden, in Westmoreland, where he wrote his earliest poems. Mickel spent his youth at Langholme on the Esk, and his first important poem, “Pollio,” written at eighteen, was in memory of his life there. Bruce was brought up at Kinneswood, a village on Lochleven, and his early poetry had much to do with the scenery about that place. Beattie spent his youth at Lawrencekirk and Fordoun on the east coast of Scotland, and “The Minstrel,” his first important poem, is a record of his early life. It would certainly be a misreading of these facts to infer that to write well of Nature the poet must have been brought up in the country. Genius has the rare gift of seeing a very little and straightway knowing a great deal. It would be equally wrong to infer that poets write of Nature when they are young and give it up when they put away childish things. The import of these facts in this period seems to be merely that there was a genuine and widespread love of Nature on the part of many isolated poets, who, by the circumstances of their lives, knew Nature better than they did literature, but that this love was not sufficiently robust in individual cases to withstand the cramping influences of city life and literary coteries. The developing tradition was carried on not so much by the persistent influence of a few as by the constant springing up of the same spirit in many minds.

In a transition period the predominant spirit is self-conscious, authoritative, and full of maxims drawn from its own successes. The new spirit comes in, as it were, by chance. It is but slightly theoretic, following instinct rather than well-defined principles. In its first stages it is apologetic rather than aggressive. These characteristics, on the whole, mark the love of Nature in the early eighteenth-century poetry. There are, however, occasional indications that some poets, at least, not only wrote according to new canons of taste, but were distinctly conscious of their revolt from the old. So early as 1709 Ambrose Philips in the Preface to his “Pastorals” justified his choice of country themes by pointing out the pleasing effect of natural scenes on the mind. John Gay’s enunciation of a creed, though meant as a satire, was so just a condemnation of existing poetic conventions, and so apt a prophecy of one phase of the new spirit that it really deserves to rank among revolutionary statements of theory. Allan Ramsay’s Preface to “The Evergreens” is equally emphatic in its scorn of classical limitations, and it was meant in downright earnest. The thought of the Preface finds expression several times in his poems as well. Dyer gives utterance to a similar scorn of Parnassus in “The Country Walk.” Shenstone, in his “Prefatory Essay on Elegy,” shows a timid but perfectly clear recognition of the fact that he is breaking away from poetical canons. Mason in the Preface to “Elfrida” says that he has introduced descriptions with a purpose of rendering the drama more pleasing. Whitehead’s “Enthusiast” with its elaborate statement of both sides of the case in man versus Nature is an important indication of the clearness with which the points of the controversy were at that time recognized. The strongest and most detailed statement of a creed came about four years later in Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope” (1756). Nothing else so clear, direct, and full appeared before the Prefaces of Wordsworth. After Warton it is not so necessary to indicate all self-conscious statements. It will suffice briefly to indicate Langhorne’s statement of his purpose in writing, Goldsmith’s vigorous attacks on falseness and affectation in poetry, Beattie’s Wordsworthian Preface to “The Minstrel,” John Scott’s criticism on existing poetry and his statement of his own aim in the Preface to his “Amoebaean Eclogues,” Crabbe’s expressed determination to treat of Nature as it really is, Cowper’s pleasure in the fact that his knowledge and inspiration come straight from Nature and his persistent reiteration of his belief in the superiority of the country over the city, and finally Burns’ many critical remarks on the essential qualities of descriptive poetry.

The characteristics of the poetry of Nature that was growing up during the eighteenth century have been already indicated in one way and another, but it seems necessary here to gather them up into general statements. The easiest and clearest way will be to make a somewhat detailed summary of such traits of this poetry as seem to foreshadow the later treatment of Nature, especially as exemplified in Wordsworth. In the comparison I keep mainly to Wordsworth both for the sake of simplicity, and because, though in romantic periods each poet works out his own salvation along original and self-determined lines, yet Wordsworth more nearly than any other poet expresses the variety and complexity of interest in the new feeling toward Nature.

Wordsworth said that a part of his endowment as a poet was a peculiar openness to sense impressions, and that this endowment was cultivated by his environment in youth until the real facts of Nature were perceived by him with fulness and accuracy. In his wholesale condemnation of the period between “Paradise Lost” and “The Seasons” the chief count in the indictment is the absence of new images drawn from Nature. Full, accurate, first-hand knowledge of Nature is then with Wordsworth a _sine qua non_, a basis on which interpretation must rest. During the eighteenth century no one man had Wordsworth’s inevitable ear or practiced eye, but the whole impression made is that men were at last out of doors, looking and listening for themselves. Each man sees many facts not before noted, and collectively the poetry of the period presents a great body of natural phenomena of all sorts. Poets, artists, travelers, writers of fiction, unite to swell the stock of facts about the external world. Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Journals” show with what delight she and her brother dwelt upon the baldest statement of the actual facts of Nature. Gray in his “Letters,” John Scott in his “Eclogues,” show this same pleasure in simply cataloguing the lovely facts of the out-door world. Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Thomson, Dyer, Cowper, Burns, all the landscape painters from Wilson to Girtin, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe, are but leaders of the many who were striving to make report of what they found in waters and skies, in field, mountain, and plain. The wide range of these facts is astonishing. The knowledge of the poet is no longer confined to parks and gardens, to the mild and lovely aspects of Nature. His aroused curiosity pushes him out into new realms of inquiry. All kinds of Nature, animate and inanimate, wild and tame, remote and close at hand, attract interested attention.

The mere mass and variety of this accumulated knowledge is sufficiently significant in its bearing on the development of a new taste for Nature, but a further general question arises as to the accuracy and delicacy of the observation. There certainly was none of the scientific spirit that would feel the charm of bare exactness, and there was hardly any of Wordsworth’s feeling that to misrepresent a fact of Nature would be sacrilege. Facts were, indeed, often noted in a loose, careless way, as if of slight importance. But taken as a whole the observation bears the mark of the eye on the object. From Lady Winchilsea to Bowles every poet who has been esteemed noteworthy in the study of Nature gives the impression that he speaks from personal knowledge, and no poetry can make that impression unless it is in its main lines true. Delicacy of observation is another matter.

What the eighteenth-century poets did was to give truthful expression to very many natural facts of a kind fairly obvious to an age well versed in the lore of field and wood; but new to an age just emerged from the gates of a park. It is observation of this abundant, truthful, obvious sort that we find in Ambrose Philips, Gay, Ramsay, Shenstone, John Scott, and largely this even in Thomson. The commonest facts of Nature, the blue sky, wild flowers on a rocky ledge, rough little streams, were a wonder and a delight. Discrimination comes after general and obvious facts have been accepted and assimilated. It is inevitable, even setting aside their different temperaments, that Cowper should have more of it than Thomson. The strange thing is that in the early stages of the poetry of Nature we should find any observation so close and delicate as that in the study of night by Lady Winchilsea, of burns and mountain pools by Allan Ramsay, of winter skies and ice-burdened streams by Armstrong; or as that in Thomson’s sunset after rain, Dyer’s wide views and homely bits of country life, Collins’ evening, Gray’s skylark and song-thrush, Thomas Warton’s opening spring, Logan’s cuckoo, and Scott’s trees.

The fulness and accuracy of the eighteenth-century study of Nature may be further seen by a brief analysis of the sense impressions most frequently noted.

Wordsworth is said to have been physically deficient in the sense of smell, hence the noticeable absence of odors in his poems may be accounted for. But it is doubtless true of all poetry that fragrances are more scantily recorded than are other facts, and that there is seldom any delicate discrimination between various sorts of sweet odors. For this reason such slight study of odors as we find in the transition poetry is the more to be dwelt upon. There are certainly not infrequent observations showing close knowledge. J. Philips notes the faint sweetness of cowslips; Relph speaks of the odor of the “fresh prumrose on the furst of May;” Dyer and Shenstone of the fragrance of brakes; Dyer of sweet-smelling honeysuckles; Shenstone, Thomas Warton, and Cowper of the fragrant woodbine; J. Philips and Mickle of scented orchards; Cowper calls attention to the odor of limes and the fresh smell of turf; Lady Winchilsea speaks of the “aromatic pain” from the odor of a jonquil, the “potent fragrance” of which is recognized also by Thomson. Two odors frequently mentioned are of “the perfuming flowery bean” celebrated first by John Philips, then by Gay, Thomson, Savage, Shenstone, and Joseph Warton; and the fragrance of hay noted by Thomson, Gay, Ramsay, Savage, Potter, Relph, Thomas Warton, and Mickle. When homely, unusual odors, like that of the bean, are noticed there is often exceptional vividness of statement. What took rank in the poet’s mind as his own discovery brought out a natural freshness of phrase. One other fact frequently noted is that odors are strongest at morning or evening or after a rain. These specific references are of real importance in showing new powers of perception, but it must be admitted that in general the use of odors was of the conventional sort, referring rather vaguely to sweet breezes blowing over flowery fields.

The sensitiveness to sound so often remarked in Wordsworth’s poems is a characteristic of the poetry of Nature throughout the century before Wordsworth. The music of Nature was a source of widespread delight. The “pleasant noise of waters,” for instance, receives some notice from nearly every poet in the list, while in travels and fiction some of the most effective passages are on the sounds of rapid streams and waterfalls. In poetry the old words “warbling,” “tinkling,” and “murmuring,” are still much used, but Ramsay’s rill that “makes a singin din,” Thomson’s roused-up river that “thunders” through the rocks, Mallet’s river with its “sounding sweep,” Collins’ “brawling springs,” and Cowper’s “chiming rills” are a few of the phrases that mark a more individual and personal way of listening. One of Wordsworth’s often-quoted lines on sound has to do with the greater distinctness of the song of mountain streams by night. Mr. Heard gives this passage as an instance of Wordsworth’s peculiarly close observation. But the clearness with which falling or running water is heard at night had been noted at least six times in the literature before Wordsworth. Lady Winchilsea mentioned it in her “Revery.” Beattie speaks of waterfalls heard from afar amid the lonely night, and again of the quiet evening when naught but the torrent is heard on the hill. The lines in John Brown’s “Rhapsody” have already been quoted, as also his “Letter” in which he notes the variety of sounds from distant waterfalls as one of the attractions of a walk at night. And Gray also speaks of the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day time. Several other authors, as Dyer and Mallet, have practically the same idea when they mention the unusual clearness of the sound of falling water in a breathless noon, or in the depths of a silent forest.

The sounds made by winds are also often and particularly noted. They sigh through reeds, they make a remote and hollow noise in “wintery pines,” they murmur through the poplars, they rustle lightly over “deep embattled ears of corn,” they join in concert with woods and waters, or they sweep in mighty harmonies through ancient forests. The whispering breezes, and dying gales of the classical poetry do not often occur. Brown in his “Letter” shows how deeply he was impressed by the roaring of the winds through the mountains, and the one passage in which Dr. Johnson showed any appreciation of wild Nature is a description of the combined sounds of streams and wind on a stormy night in Scotland. A characteristic passage is Thomson’s fine description of thunder among the mountains. Wordsworth, from the peculiar delicacy of his perceptions and perhaps from his contemplative Nature, was deeply sensitive to the silences in the world about him. There is some though but little indication of a similar pleasure in preceding poetry. One of the best passages is Thomson’s description of the boding silence before a storm. This has, however, much less of the real Wordsworthian spirit than has Brown’s conception of the silence that spoke from the starry vault, the shadowy cliffs, the motionless groves, and the faint mirror of the placid lake.

Of sounds from animate Nature the emphasis is of course on birds. But the feathered choir of the classical period has been resolved into distinct species, each with a voice of its own. The nightingale is not supplanted but she is no longer a monopolist in the realms of the muses. In this transition poetry the cuckoo takes an interesting place. Wordsworth’s address to the bird as “the darling of the spring” gives the association of ideas found in most of the early poems. The cuckoo is the harbinger of spring. Armstrong and A. Philips have the loud note of the cuckoo as one of the first hints of the opening year, and Thomson’s symphony of spring is introduced by “the first note the hollow cuckoo sings.” Mendes says it is “the cuckoo that announceth spring,” and Gray speaks of the cuckoo’s note as part of “the untaught harmony of spring.” The peculiarity of the cuckoo’s note is also often mentioned. Other birds have many notes, says John Cunningham, “the cuckoo has but two.” Logan, as Wordsworth after him, records the fact that the bird is usually unseen, and both speak of the schoolboy’s surprise as the strange cry falls on his ear. The lark, the nightingale, and the linnet are frequently mentioned, but usually in terms somewhat conventional. They had been in poetry so long that a distinct effort would have been needed to think of them under new phrases. To be released from the captivity of a stock diction and conventional sentiment they waited for Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth. It is in observations on birds not counted poetical property that we find fresh and exact expression. A mark of the new spirit is the pleasure in such sounds as the call of the curlew, the boom of the bittern, the chattering of magpies, the caw of rooks, the piping of quails, the scream of jays, the clang of seamews, the shrill clamor of cranes, the shriek of the gull, the whistle of plovers, the whir of the partridge. To hear such sounds the poet must wander over moors, by sedgy lakes, along rough shores, far enough from trim parks. To bring such sounds into poetry marked a great revolution in taste from the days of the lorn nightingale and the plaintive turtle. As a whole we may say that the treatment of sound in eighteenth-century poetry is abundant, accurate, and often very effective.

The process of passing from general to specific statements as a result of increased knowledge shows itself again in the use of color. The universal paint of the classical school has been resolved into some of its constituent elements. These are not many, however, and there is not much nice discrimination into shades and tints. The colors most often observed are green, blue, yellow or gold, purple, red or crimson, and brown, the order given being the order of their frequency. Purple is used less frequently than in the classical poetry and usually has some real artistic significance. Yellow, a comparatively new word, is used often of harvests, of trees in autumn, of moonlight, and of various sunlight effects. Dyer gave early prominence to the word as an epithet applied to Nature. Brown is applied in somewhat the conventional manner to streams and shadows. Thomson, Dyer, Savage, and Cowper made the most effective use of color, and it is important to observe that their advance consisted not so much in seeing many more colors than had been seen before, as in discovering color in many more objects than formerly. They did not merely see that “all above is blue and all below is green.” They saw the blue heavens, but they saw, too, the blue of “sky dyed plumbs,” of mists, of distant hills, of streams and bays, of ice-films, of the halcyon’s wing, of curling smoke, of the lightning flash. The endive, the lavender, the lilac, the violet, the harebell, the heath-flower, are singled out as blue. And Dyer speaks of the blue color of the poplars, and Dalton of blue slate roofs. Not merely the general green of a summer landscape is commented upon, but there are closer observations concerning the varying shades of green as the trees are massed together. The russet tints brought out in green tree tops at sunset, the funereal green of yews, the yellow-green in a sunset sky, the yellow tinge in green grass almost ready for the scythe, the glossy green of the holly, the deep green of box, the contrasting green of elm, oak, and maple, are some typical observations.

The use of color, however, seems, on the whole, in spite of its abundance and picturesqueness, hardly so varied and individual as the use of sound.

A division into colors and sounds leaves many sorts of observation unnoted, and frequently these are of great importance as indicating close knowledge; but they have been so often commented upon in the study from author to author that even a suggestive recapitulation is hardly needed here. Enough has been called to mind to show that there was much knowledge of the external world, and that much of this knowledge was reported in words so direct and truthful that they must have come from personal experience.

In the classical period we have seen that only the milder forms of Nature were cared for. Wordsworth was, on the other hand, essentially the poet of mountains, lakes, and streams. It will be of interest to note the attitude of the transition poetry toward the various kinds of Nature. And first we may sum up the evidences of mountain enthusiasm.

In the first fifty years of the century we have only the expressions of pleasure in climbing mountains or hills by J. Philips, Gay, and Dyer; the various descriptive references in Ramsay and in Mallet; Boydell’s crude work in Wales, and Paul Sandby’s sketches in the Highlands. Ramsay and Mallet show a consciousness of mountains, and evidently regard them as noticeable and picturesque elements of a scene, and Dyer is of distinct importance because of his lingering pleasure in the beautiful views opening up before him as he climbs the mountain, and especially because of his poetic comprehension of mountain solitudes. But it is during the next thirty-five years (1750–85) that we find the most adequate eighteenth-century treatment of mountains. During this period Brown, Pennant, Young, Gray, and Gilpin visited Scotland, Wales, and the English Lakes, and wrote of mountains with an enthusiasm hardly equaled in the succeeding century. In fiction were Amory’s eulogy of Westmoreland, and his exaggerated pictures of Cumberland, and Smollett’s description of the country round Loch Leven. In painting, Boydell, Devis, Sandby, Bellers, Wilson, Barret, Farington, and John Cozens were studying mountain scenery in Scotland, in northern England, in Wales, Ireland, and in the Alps. In poetry we have Coventry’s address to Vaughan on mountain climbing; Dalton’s apostrophe to Skiddaw; Brown’s rhapsody on the mountains and lakes of Westmoreland; the mountain scenery in Gray’s “Bard” and the poems of “Ossian;” the many descriptive references in Dyer’s “Fleece,” Jago’s “Edge Hill,” Mickle’s “Almada Hill” and “May Day,” and Scott’s “Amwell;” and Beattie’s study of the influence of mountains on a poetic mind. During the last twenty-five years of the century there is, in poetry, a curious apparent cessation of mountain interest. The most highly poetic minds, Blake, Cowper, and Burns, have none of it. Crabbe does not touch upon mountains. Lesser poets, except Bowles at the very end of the century, are equally silent. This is not, however, true in other realms of art. Mountain scenery is still, during these years, a large element in romances, and in travels, and many artists are sketching in the picturesque regions opened up to them by earlier students of mountain landscapes.

Many lovers of Nature and of poetry have commented with surprise on the slow development of the poetic appreciation of mountains. It is, perhaps, even more strange that English poetry should have been still slower in its discovery of the ocean. It is as if English poets from Dryden to Byron had all lived inland. Even in Wordsworth, in spite of some wonderful lines, there is no treatment of the ocean at all comparable to his study of mountains. In the classical age the ocean was a dreary waste. In the transition poetry we do not find much more knowledge or appreciation. The one quality of the ocean that receives anything like adequate expression is its boundlessness. Characteristic lines are by John G. Cooper.

In unconfined perspective send thy gaze
Disdaining limit o’er the green expanse
Of ocean.

Armstrong says that the “floating wilderness”

Scorns our miles and calls Geography
A shallow prier.

Mickle looks upon the awful solitude of ocean and his imagination is stirred by

the last dim wave in boundless space
Involved and lost.

These are the best lines I have found. The chief expressions of pleasure in the ocean are Gay’s mild delight in a sunset across the sea, and subsequent moonlight effects, and Beattie’s pleasing dread as he seeks the shore to listen to the wide-weltering waves. We find in Cowper’s letters a more appreciative passage on the ocean than occurs in any of the poetry. The most sincere ocean enthusiasm is in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances. Travelers, even those who went along the coast of Wales and among the Scottish islands or to the Isle of Wight, say little of the sea. The ocean was, in fact, much such a burden as Sterne’s plain. When the poet had once said that it was big and awful his stock of impressions was exhausted. In painting, the ocean was not entirely ignored, but in this province, too, there was meagerness of conception and expression. The ocean waited for Turner and Byron and Shelley.

One of the interesting characteristics of the love of Nature in the eighteenth century is a delight in wide views. What had in the classical period “tired the travelling eye,” with the dawning of the new spirit gave satisfaction. It was in accord with the mental revolt against close boundaries of any sort. From the day when John Philips ventured to express some pleasure in the view from a hill, and Gay climbed Cotton Hill to raise his mind nearer heaven, and Dyer spent days in studying with an artist’s eye the colors and forms of the view from Grongar Hill, to the time when Beattie eagerly climbed the rugged steeps of Scottish mountains so that he might see the morning mists rolling and tumbling over the rough hills beneath him, do we find this pronounced delight in wide views. Even poets who show no great love for mountains, as Thomson, Mallet, Collins, the Wartons, Langhorne, Mickle, and John Scott, and even poets of confessedly tame scenery as Cowper, love “green heights” and extended prospects. To the expression of this feeling Amory and Mrs. Radcliffe, Brown, Young, and Pennant make large contributions. This feeling shows itself also in gardening. The cutting-down of tall hedges, the opening-up of vistas, were a result of the change of taste and a contribution to it.

We have seen that during the classical poetry the skies in favor were cloudless and that of all sky phenomena the rainbow excited most attention. In the transition poetry we find much of this love of fair summer skies and expressed sometimes with a new freshness as when Dyer wishes nothing above his head but “the roof on which the gods do tread,” or when Ramsay looks with joy upon “the lift’s unclouded blue,” or when the clear gladness of heaven shines down from the lovely skies of Blake. But on the whole, references to the serene day-time sky are conventional. It is another illustration of the fact that such aspects of Nature as were already known and had come to be spoken of after a set fashion were slow to be emancipated into a new phraseology. Better work is done in describing what Coleridge calls the “goings-on” of the sky. Thomson knew the sky in all its phases. Parnell describes well the airy tumult of clouds after a storm. Mallet has one or two rather effective studies of a stormy sky. One of Beattie’s best descriptions is of a shifting cloudy sky on a windy autumn day, and he has other effective cloud studies. But taken in the mass the material is scanty and not of great value. It was Wordsworth and Shelley who first gave adequate expression to the mysterious and varied charm of the day-time sky.

The love of the night sky and of night itself is first found in Lady Winchilsea, and for close observation and delicate feeling there is nothing better throughout the century. There is, however, much use of night, moonlight, and stars in a new and appreciative fashion. In Gay’s “Dione” there are several attractive little moonlight pictures. Parnell was impressed by the depth, the serenity, and the silence of a starry sky on a clear night. Coventry observes how fast the moon travels through light clouds as if bent on a journey, while in clear weather she sits steady empress of the skies. Joseph Warton notes the shining of hills and streams under the light of a full moon. Mickle has some beautiful lines on both moon and stars as they rise from behind certain favorite hills. He walks much at night and loves to watch the trembling line of light from the moon as it shines across the lake, or the soft effect of the yellow moonlight sleeping on the hills. Beattie stays out all night to watch the aspects of the sky till the dawn of day. Morning and evening twilight are less often spoken of. There is certainly nothing else in the century to compare with Collins’ “Evening.” Sunset and sunrise are often described, but nowhere with more general effectiveness than in Thomson, or with more minute color study than in Savage.

Closely connected with the knowledge of the sky is the new feeling toward storms. In the classical poetry they had been ignored or used as similes for disaster. But one of the first evidences of a new spirit was in the appreciative description of winter storms, as in Riccaltoun, Armstrong, and Thomson. The early descriptions and the multiplicity of storms in Thomson and Mallet give at first the impression that this element held a larger place in poetry than it really did. Ramsay has some good lines on winter storms. There is an admirable stanza in Collins’ “Ode to Liberty,” and another in Thomas Warton’s “Grave of King Arthur.” In Beattie’s “Minstrel,” and in several of Burns’ poems there are expressions of delight in the fierce play of the elements, but that exhausts the list of notable passages. It is only in Beattie that we find any of the modern sense of kinship between the tumult of life and Nature’s fierce conflicts, and the imaginative force of a passage like that in “The Excursion” where the Wanderer longs to be a spirit and so mingle with primal energies in their mightiest activities, or the lyric passion of a cry like that in Shelley’s apostrophe to the West Wind, are not even hinted at.

The most pronounced change came with reference to these grander, wilder aspects of Nature. We have still to note the treatment of the gentle pleasant things of Nature, as birds, flowers, trees.

There was, through the classical period, abundant delight, in a general way, in meadows bursting into bloom, and in bright blossoms in the garden. The use of the words “flowery,” “adorned,” “decked,” “enameled,” etc., usually had reference to fields of flowers thought of in a vague, pleasant way. The changes that come during the transition poetry are a resolving of the general into the specific, a concentration of attention on English flowers, and a greatly increased knowledge of individual flowers. The rose and the lily often give place to homelier blooms as those of peas and beans, the bramble rose, butter flowers, clover, heath-bells, crowfoot, the tangled vetch, the mandrake, the thistle. The increased minuteness of observation shows itself in such garden studies as we find in Thomson and Cowper. A feeling of personal relationship toward flowers finds its highest and sweetest expression in Burns’ “Daisy.”

In the classical poetry trees in general are an important part of the stock-in-trade. The new feeling shows itself in a growing tendency to think of trees as individuals. In a landscape trees are mentioned by name. The thin leav’d ash, whispering poplars, the glossy rind’d beech, venerable oaks tossing giant arms, waving elms, quivering aspens, murmuring pines, hoary willows, sycamores green, tawny, or scarlet, according to the season, white-blossomed hawthorn, deep green hollies, elders with silver blossoms, stand out from the mass and are known for their own qualities. Minute observation is indicated by the descriptive phrases used. The color of the trunk, the spread of the branches, the changing hue of the leaves, the kind of blossoms, are severally noted. Two special studies of trees are by Lady Winchilsea and Dr. Dalton, and are of early date. Dyer and Cowper give the best studies of trees seen in a mass, and yet individually noted. While there is not a touch of the deep forest in this poetry, there are many lines describing woodland effects. Thomson, Potter, and Cowper find especial pleasure in the lovely interplay of light and shade in a pathway overhung by woven branches. The brown shadows and the softened light in a deeply wooded nook are observed. Gentle streams sing happily under a cooling covert of green boughs. The quiet of the woods is broken only by the plash of waters, the rustle of boughs, the whisper of leaves, the hum of insects, the song of birds, sounds from distant flocks and herds, or the stroke of the woodman’s axe. Trees also form an important part of every general landscape. But no poet has given so much of the real forest feeling as Mrs. Radcliffe. Of travelers Young has most to say about trees but his observations are largely scientific and utilitarian. On the whole we may say that trees are given abundant and discriminating attention, but that this attention seldom penetrates beyond external, artistic qualities. Personal friendship for trees such as we find in Lowell, for instance, has hardly yet reached expression.

Birds have already been discussed under sound, but it remains here to state that the habits of birds, their manner of flight, their nests, the trees they choose, their ways of protecting their young, were all topics on which much was known. Of minor poets, those who knew birds well, are Jago, Potter, and Bruce. Gray adds some perfect touches. Best of all for accurate description and real understanding are Thomson, Cowper, and Burns. The prominent place of the cuckoo has already been spoken of. The redbreast and the thrush with “speckly breast” rank not far behind in interest. The redbreast found early honor in Armstrong’s “Winter,” and then in Thomson’s, and is one of the pleasing elements in Cowper’s “Winter Walk.” On the whole, birds of the lakes and streams seem to be better known than birds of the tree and copse.

One phase of the literary treatment of birds is a recognition of their rights as free, living beings. This feeling, not toward birds alone but toward all animals, is one of the marks of the new spirit. There is even in Lady Winchilsea’s “Revery” a slight hint of the conception that animals would not suffer if man had not proved himself a tyrant, and Gay carries out the same thought in one of his “Fables.” Thomson’s protests against killing animals for food are the first strong statements of the new feeling. Shenstone, in “Rural Elegance” and “The Dying Kid,” shows some sympathetic regard for animals. Jago and Potter and Langhorne protested vigorously against cruelty to birds. Beattie had the strongest possible dislike toward so-called English sports. The feeling of close fellowship and almost human love toward animals, so marked in Wordsworth and Coleridge, did not find expression in the transition poetry until Burns and Cowper gave it full statement.

Throughout the poetry of the eighteenth century we have observed a turning from the general to the specific. There is likewise a similar tendency to localization. The classical poetry of Nature belonged to no special spot, hardly to any special country. The poetry of Wordsworth and of Walter Scott was, on the other hand, eminently local. They celebrated the mountains and islands and streams of the region they knew. Wordsworth complained that before his day no one had sung of British mountains. It is interesting to note the growth of this passion for certain spots definitely pointed out and named, certain natural scenes known and loved as a person might be. A brief survey of the mountains and streams thus celebrated in eighteenth-century poetry will serve as illustrative. After Dyer’s “Grongar Hill” come other mountains of Wales. The hoary heights of huge Plynlymmon; the wide, aërial side of Cader-ydris; the craggy summits of cold Snowdon, king of mountains; Clyder’s cloud-enveloped head; Caer-caraduc, and others are spoken of with evident pleasure and not a little artistic perception. In Scotland the hills of Cheviot, the Pentland Hills, the mountains in the Ossian country, and those around Lochleven, are chief. In England we have the scarry side of Braids, Dafset’s ridgy mountain, Edge-Hill, Almada Hill, Derwent’s naked peaks, huge Breaden, blue-topp’d Wrekin, giant Skiddaw, the solemn wall of Malvern, the Cambrian Hills, the hills of Ilmington, and others. The spirit of localization in its application to mountains does not often go beyond calling the mountain by its own name, and using some phrase showing that this mountain is known as separate from the general mass. In its application to streams the feeling is more detailed in expression. Ramsay’s streams and pools are closely localized. Dyer celebrates not only Towy’s flood, but the Vaga, the Ryddal, the Ystwith, the Clevedoc, the Lune, and especially the Usk. Dr. Dalton traces the course of the Borrowdale Beck from Lodore Falls to the lake. Langhorne follows the track of the Bela through solitary meads, and then through the rough realms of Stainmore. He also celebrates his joy as a child in the river Eden. Smollett, on his sick bed, writes an ode to Leven Water. Bruce sings of the Po, the Queech, the Severn, and especially of his youthful delight in the Gairney. Mickle writes of the Forth, the Annan, the Ewes, and the Wauchope, but dwells with most zest on his early love of the Esk. Of peculiar interest is Akenside’s apostrophe to the Wansbeck. Hamilton, Langhorne, and Logan wrote of the Yarrow, Cowper of the Ouse, Burns of the Ayr, the Doon, the Nith, the Afton, the Devon, and many another Scotch stream, while Bowles wrote of the Itchin, the Tweed, the Cherwell, and the Wansbeck. A map might be made on which should be represented only the mountains and streams spoken of with some particularity, with something more than a mere mention, in English poetry between 1650 and 1720, and a similar map of the period from 1720 to 1795. A comparison of the two would be an interesting commentary on the growth of knowledge and interest in British scenes.

All that has been so far presented goes to show that in the antithesis between town and country the balance of favor swung round during the eighteenth century to the country. Usually the preference is implicit, and is to be inferred from the change of theme, but occasionally the antithesis is sharply stated, as, to take types, in Thomson, the Wartons, and Cowper. It is Thomson who first gives adequate statement of the transfer of sovereignty from the “fine lady muses of Richmond Hill” to “the muses of the simple country.” It is his hatred of the noisome town, his delight in fields and woods untouched by man, that established the new canon of taste. In the Wartons, twenty years later, the breach between the city and the country is almost an impassable gulf. Combined with the love of Nature in her external forms there is that spirit of romantic melancholy by virtue of which the poet regards Nature as a refuge from the tormenting complexities that beset the life of men in communities. There is usually a touch, sometimes more than a touch, of morbidness in the passionate eagerness to escape not only from the city into Nature, but from man and all traces of his dominion into a solitude free from all human suggestiveness. Forty years after the Wartons, Cowper’s famous epigram, “God made the country and man made the town,” summed the matter up according to the new view. Cowper is as emphatic in his preferences as his predecessors, and much more detailed and minute in his expression. With him there is no vague generalizing, no morbid or passionate over-statement. His love of the country is a fundamental fact not only in his physical, but also and even especially in his moral and spiritual, life. It is a fixed principle, quiet, rational, inevitable. The anti-classical side of the city and country antithesis receives in Cowper’s poetry its most decisive and most reasonable eighteenth-century statement. We hardly find anything so conclusive in fiction or in travels. There is an occasional expression of regret at going back to towns after a trip through the mountains and lakes, but as a rule the preference for the country is left to be inferred from the general tenor of the traveler’s writings. Mrs. Brooke protests much against London, and declares her preference for Nature unadorned. Mackenzie’s Julia rejoices over her country birth and education, and Mrs. Radcliffe reiterates the desirability of living far from towns and as close as possible to the influence of Nature. Cowper, however, remains as having given the final, emphatic statement.

Through all this detailed study and wide knowledge of Nature there runs an undercurrent of personal enthusiasm which is quite a separate thing from the knowledge of Nature, but which led to that knowledge and was fed by it. Sometimes we are left to infer this enthusiasm from results, but oftener it finds clear statement. There is frequent expression of such “unspeakable joy” as Ambrose Philips felt when he gazed on a little country home, or of Ramsay’s “heartsome joy” on a bright spring morning

to see the rising plants,
And hear the birds chirm o’er their pleasin’ rants,

or of Hamilton’s rapturous joy as he lies on the flowering turf, his soul “commercing with the sky.” In many passages Thomson expresses his passionate delight in the music, the color, the fragrances of the out-door world. Dyer’s joys run high as he lies on the mountain-turf. Shenstone says that the beauties of Nature alone bear perpetual sway, and he thinks with scorn of a soul so narrow that it cannot relish Nature’s calm delights. Joseph Warton cannot find words to express the ecstasy with which he looks on Nature. John Langhorne’s only wish is that he may enjoy the blessings Nature gives to those who love her, and says that her charm alone is unfading. Beattie says that the man who goes to Nature has rapture ever new. Cowper thinks that any man who turns away from Nature starves deservedly. Burns says that he looked upon Nature with boundless joy. This feeling of exhilaration, of rapturous delight, is pervasive. It is often inadequate, or vague, or extravagant in statement, but the delight is unfeigned, the enthusiasm real, and in poet after poet it demanded expression. That it seldom found the perfect statement only means that art is long and that much thinking and feeling in an age as in an individual must go before the final art-form.

Much of this delight in Nature is in kind though not in degree like that which Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” calls his second period of love for Nature, the time when the colors and forms of the external world were a sufficiently engrossing pleasure, and he felt no need of “a remoter charm by thought supplied.” But Wordsworth quickly passed from this stage of pleasure to another. In his best descriptions, as in “The Yew Trees,” he gives a few external details, and then at once penetrates to the inner spirit of the scene. He is like a portrait painter who represents the features with truth and simplicity but makes the face live because he has divined the qualities of soul behind it. Now whatever philosophical tenets Wordsworth held he certainly thought of this soul of Nature, whether of Nature as a whole, or in special parts, as in some way a manifestation of divinity. In other words he saw God immanent in Nature. The classical conception also saw God in Nature, but as the remote Architect, Artificer, Lawgiver. The universe was dead, cold, inert matter. For the difficulty with which it was made to serve men’s needs the defenders of Omnipotence felt apologetic explanations necessary. We have seen that during the eighteenth century there came a great and joyous awakening to the external charm of the world. Are there also indications that the divine life in Nature was felt?

Throughout the eighteenth century the usual thought of God in relation to Nature is the classical one. He is the author and controller of the universe; but there are some poems or passages or separate lines that seem to indicate a new conception. Lady Winchilsea recognizes a curious correspondence between Nature and her own heart, and says that in the quiet of a beautiful night she feels the presence of something too high for syllables to speak. There is a similar feeling in Hamilton’s description of a silent grove. In the “Nocturnal Revery” and in “Contemplation” the idea of divinity is not explicitly stated, but in Parnell’s “Hymn” the song of praise is professedly to the Source of all Nature, because through Nature the divine spirit had spoken peace to the poet’s troubled heart. The incessant and ever-present creative activity of God is clearly set forth in Thomson’s “Hymn.” Each ray of sunshine, every blossoming flower of spring, every leaping stream, every rolling orb, performs its function as a direct expression of divine energy. And some lines give a further suggestion of divine immanence. The rolling year is full of God. The seasons are but the varied God. The beauty of God walks forth in the flushing spring. Such expressions as these mark a half-involuntary poetic seizing of the new idea of Nature as the bodily presence of which God was the soul, but they do not indicate Thomson’s leading ideas. Mallet, imitative of Thomson in this as in other respects, usually speaks of God as the Creator, but in one passage touches on the full stream of universal Goodness that is ever-flowing through earth, air, and sea, and on the ceaseless song of praise going up from the great community of Nature’s sons. Boyse in his “Deity” thinks of God as an Almighty Architect, but has a few lines in which he represents all Nature as being momently derived from God. Young has a significant line when he says that night is the “felt presence of the Deity.” The theme of Akenside’s poem is to show the response which the imaginative mind finds in Nature, and this response is, he says, the voice of the divine spirit. His conception is usually, to be sure, that the divine spirit speaks through the forms of Nature, rather than that the form and the spirit have an essential union. Yet sometimes he speaks more clearly the new thought. He says that the man who loves Nature holds daily converse with God himself; the beauty of Nature flows directly from God; the order in Nature is sacred; the influence whereby Nature soothes and cheers and elevates man is really a divine influence. This is the fullest recognition of an in-dwelling God until we reach Cowper. In his poetry we find a clear statement of belief in the lines,

There lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God,

but the point is not one on which he dwells. These passages certainly foreshadow Wordsworth’s conception of God in Nature, but they are comparatively feeble and unimaginative in expression. There is nothing so Wordsworthian in Thomson’s sonorous lines or in Akenside’s ample statement as there is the feeling that penetrates the brief words of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell. Compared to these even Cowper seems cold and intellectual.