Chapter II (2)

As further illustrative of Thomson’s knowledge of all that pertained to the country we have his admirably vivid and detailed accounts of the homely labors of a farmer’s life, as plowing,[305] sowing,[306] reaping,[307] hay making,[308] and sheep shearing.[309] Of these the sheep shearing is the most simply charming and natural. It is also the most noteworthy, because sheep and shepherds had long been the very substance out of which pastorals were woven so that in such descriptions the contrast between the new and the old way of looking at country life is sharply defined. Thomson’s pastoral queen and shepherd king are at the opposite pole from the sentimental, affected, useless nymphs and swains who had before posed as the guardians of English sheep. His shepherds are sturdy fellows, doing honest work and plenty of it, and as such they had no predecessors in English classical poetry. The sheep, too, are real animals. They have to be watched with a vigilance of which no flower-crowned swain playing on an oaten pipe would be capable. And they must be washed and sheared and branded. In winter they must be housed and fed, no matter what the dangers on the dark, stormy hills. It is this strong, refreshing air of reality in Thomson’s poetry, and his unfeigned respect and admiration for the actual country life in England that completed the work begun by the ugly satire of Swift and the mock pastorals of Gay, and made the old, conventional, pseudo-classic pastoral from that time on an impossibility in English poetry.

The phrase, “dislike of boundaries,” is perhaps not very apt, but it may serve to describe what is certainly a pervasive quality of Thomson’s work, and a significant quality, for if there was one thing more pleasing than another to an orthodox classicist it was a well-defined limit. Thomson preferred the blank verse to the couplet because the unrhymed, flowing lines gave a certain freedom. There is an air of abundance, of even undue exuberance about much of his work. Even his diction presents this idea of lavishness. There is a surprisingly large number of such words as “effulgent,” “refulgent,” “effusion,” “diffusion,” “suffusion,” “profusion,” from the roots “fundo” and “fulgeo” with their idea of a liberal pouring out. “Luxuriant,” “ample,” “prodigal,” “boundless,” “unending,” “ceaseless,” “immense,” “interminable,” “immeasurable,” “vast,” “infinite,” are typical words.

Profusely poured around,
Materials infinite,

Infinite splendor wide investing all,

To the far horizon wide-diffused,
A boundless deep immensity of shade,

Night, a shade immense, magnificent and vast,

are typical phrases. In one short description the birds are “innumerous;” they are “prodigal” of harmony; their joy overflows in music “unconfined;” the song of the linnets is “poured out profusely.”[310] In another short passage the stores of the vale are “lavish,” the lily is “luxuriant” and grows in fair “profusion,” the flowers are “unnumbered,” beauty is “unbounded,” and bees fly in “swarming millions.”[311] When images come into his mind it is by the ten thousand. In spring the country is “one boundless blush,” “far diffused around.” He loves the “liberal air,” “lavish fragrance,” “full luxuriance,” “extensive harvests,” “immeasurable,” or “exhaustless” stores, “copious exhalations.” All is superlative, exaggerated, scornful of limits. It was “the unbounded scheme of things” that most appealed to him.

The same point receives illustration in his sense for landscape. He rejoiced in a wide view.[312] He loved to seek out some proud eminence and there let his eye wander “far excursive,” and dwell on “boundless prospects.” Such scenes not only gave him a chance for picturesque enumerations without any especial demand for minute discrimination, but they satisfied his preference for grand, general effects.

Closely connected with the sense for landscape is the use of geographical romance,[313] or the heightening of poetic effect by the accumulation of sounding geographical names.[314] The finest example of this device is in the lines descriptive of the thunder re-echoed among the mountains.[315] In this passage the impression of sublimity is due to the suggestions of mysterious elemental forces subtly associated with such names as Carnarvon, Penmaenmawr, Snowdon, Thule, and Cheviot.[316] This mental following of the thunder from peak to distant peak, this endeavor to strengthen the impression by the use of the remote and the unknown, show a mind set toward romantic rather than classical ideals.

A further indication of Thomson’s defiance of limits is his curiosity. His mind goes back of the present fact and restlessly strives after causes and origins.[317] In imagination he seeks to penetrate to the vast eternal springs from which Nature refreshes the earth.[318] The most poetic example of this questioning spirit is in his address to the winds that blow with boisterous sweep to swell the terrors of the storm.

In what far-distant region of the sky,
Hush’d in deep silence, sleep you when ’tis calm?[319]

The classical spirit held itself to useful questions that could have some rational answer. It is the romantic spirit that pushes its inquiries into the realms of the unknowable.

Throughout this study of Thomson’s work there has been an implicit recognition of his strong love for Nature. This fact receives further definite confirmation from his letters. It is interesting to note that his early life was almost as fortunate in its environment as Wordsworth’s. When he was a year old his father moved to Southdean, a small hamlet near Jedborough. Here the lad remained till he entered the university at Edinburgh at fifteen,[320] and here he apparently passed most of his vacations till he went to London at twenty-five. One of his especial friends was Dr. Cranston of Ancrum whose love of Nature was equal to his own. Thomson’s letters to Dr. Cranston, though somewhat stilted and high-flown, show clearly the eagerness with which they had together explored the picturesque country along the Tiviot and its tributary streams, the Ale and the Jed. In the first letter from London, under the date April 3, 1725, was written, “I wish you joy of the spring.” In September of the same year Thomson wrote from Barnet:

Now I imagine you seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy
on the fading of the year; now I figure you wandering,
philosophical and pensive, ’midst the brown, wither’d groves,
while the leaves rustle under your feet, the sun gives a
farewell parting gleam, and the birds

Stir the faint note and but attempt to sing.

Then again when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds
whistle, and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known
clough, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick embowering trees,
listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown
cascades, while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the
place, prompts each swelling awful thought. I am sure you would
not resign your place in that scene at any easy rate. None ever
enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There
I walk in spirit and disport in its beloved gloom. This country
I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods,
and them we have in abundance; but where is the living stream?
the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things
that elegantly please the lover of nature. Nature delights me in
every form.

Later in life Thomson was “more fat than bard beseems,” and correspondingly indolent, and his biographers give the impression that no beauty of the world about him could compete with the charms of an easy chair. But his letters still bear witness to a love of Nature as real if not as active as that of his youth. In July, 1743, he wrote to Mr. Lyttleton promising to spend some weeks with him at Hagley:

As this will fall in Autumn, I shall like it the better, for I
think that season of the year the most pleasing and the most
poetical. The spirits are not then dissipated with the gaiety
of spring, and the glaring light of summer, but composed into
a serious and tempered joy. The year is perfect.... The muses,
whom you obligingly say I shall bring with me, I shall find with
you--the muses of the great, simple country, not the little,
fine-lady muses of Richmond Hill.

Again four or five years later, he wrote to Paterson, “Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day.”[321]

This passion for Nature finds frequent expression in the poems, but no citation of specific instances can be so convincing as the general impression of unforced personal enthusiasm made upon the reader of “The Seasons.” Moreover, Thomson’s conception of the effect of Nature on man, the next topic, may be fairly counted as but a transcript from his own experience, and therefore as further illustrative of his love for Nature.

In “The Seasons” as in preceding poetry both man and Nature have a place, but there is a great transfer of emphasis. Nature had been ignored or counted as the servant, the background, the accompaniment of man. Now the human incidents are few and unimportant and are used chiefly to lay additional stress by their tone on the spirit characteristic of each season. Nature is loved and studied and described purely for her own sake. There is very little use of natural facts as similes for human qualities, and there is, practically, no use of pathetic fallacy. The effect of Nature on the man sensitive to her high ministration is represented as twofold. In the first place and chiefly, she storms his senses with her ravishing delights. She gives him pleasures of the most rich and varied sort. She enchants him with color and harmony and perfume. These pleasures are, however, of the eye and ear. They do not touch the deeper joys of the heart. Of the appeal of Nature to the soul of man, in the true Wordsworthian sense, Thomson knew little. Yet occasional passages indicate that he had received from Nature gifts higher than that of mere external, sensuous enjoyment. He attributes to Nature in at least a partially Wordsworthian sense, the power of soothing, elevating, and instructing. He sings the “infusive force” of spring on man,

When heaven and earth as if contending vie
To raise his being, and serene his soul.[322]

It is his delight to “meditate the book of Nature” for thence he hopes to “learn the moral song.”[323] At the soft evening hour, he

lonely loves
To seek the distant hills, and there converse
With nature, there to harmonize his heart.[324]

Not only does he attend to Nature’s voice from month to month, and watch with admiration her every shape, but he

Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart.[325]

While these and a few other similar passages would hardly be remarked in the poetry of Nature after Wordsworth, they are of great historical importance because they show the early beginning of that spirit which received its final and perfect expression seventy years later in “The Lyrical Ballads.”

Thomson’s two dominant conceptions in his thought of God in Nature were as the almighty Creator and the ever-active Ruler. The whole tenor of his poems goes to show that he saw in Nature not God himself but God’s hand. Even his invocations to Nature, animate and inanimate, to praise God in one general song of adoration, are but highly emotional and figurative statements of the conception that God is not all, but Lord of all. Now and then, however, in the midst of the old ideas there comes the breath of a new thought. In one line we find the cold, conventional idea; in the next, an intimation of divine immanence. God’s beauty walks forth in the spring. His spirit breathes in the gales. The seasons “are but the varied God.” God is the Universal Soul of Heaven and earth. He is the Essential Presence in all Nature.[326] Such sentences as these, whether uttered consciously, or half unconsciously under the influence of poetic excitement, clearly prefigure the modern conception of the union and inter-penetration of the physical and spiritual worlds.

Of the two general points to be kept in view in the study of Thomson as a poet of Nature the second was a consideration of his affiliations with the classical spirit. It is surprising to observe in how few respects such affiliations can be justly predicated. There are occasional references to his Doric reed, and frequent invocations to his muse. As preliminary justification of his choice of themes are quotations from Virgil and Horace. The authority of the “Rural Maro” and the example of Cincinnatus lend added dignity to the English plow. Personifications of the conventional type often appear. There is one purely didactic description of the cure for a pest of insects, and another description of the method by which bees are robbed of their honey, that are evidently framed on Latin models. Nor do we miss the ever-recurring advice to read the page of the Mantuan swain beneath a spreading tree on a warm noon.

We also find that toward mountains and the sea Thomson held almost the traditional attitude. His nearness to the coast and his knowledge of shore birds show that he could not have been entirely ignorant of the ocean, but it apparently made little impression on him, for he seldom mentions it even casually, and but once with any emphasis. It is then one of the elements of a wild, fierce storm that sweeps the coast. A few of his epithets for mountains, as “keen-air’d” and “forest-rustling,” are new though not especially felicitous, and he often mentions mountains by name, or as bounding some distant prospect. But in general his conception and his phraseology are those of his contemporaries. He speaks of the Alps as “dreadful,” as “horrid, vast, sublime,” and again as “horrid mountains.” There is nowhere any evidence of the modern feeling toward mountains, though there are frequent expressions of appreciative love for green hills.

The point in which Thomson shows strongest traces of the old influence is his diction. He often has the new thought before he has found the appropriate dress for it. Birds are still the “plumy” or “feathery people,” and fish are the “finny race.” “Shaggy” and “nodding” are used of mountains and rocks and forests, and “deformed” and “inverted” of winter, in true classical fashion. “Maze” is one of his most frequent words. “Horrid” still holds a useful place. “Amusing” is five times applied to the charms of some landscape. Leaves are the “honours” of trees, paths are “erroneous,” caverns “sweat,” and all sorts of things are “innumerous.” He also makes large use of Latinized words such as “turgent,” “bibulous,” “relucent,” “luculent,” “irriguous,” “gelid,” “ovarious,” “incult,” “concactive,” “hyperborean.” These words can hardly be said to belong to any received poetic diction. They are rather a mannerism of Thomson’s style, and an outgrowth of his delight in swelling, sounding phrases.

From this summary we at once perceive how few and comparatively unimportant were the characteristics held in common by Thomson and the classicists in their treatment of external Nature.

This study of “The Seasons” shows that so far as intrinsic worth is concerned the poems are marked by a strange mingling of merits and defects, but that, considered in their historical place in the development of the poetry of Nature, their importance and striking originality can hardly be over-stated. Though Thomson talked the language of his day, his thought was a new one. He taught clearly, though without emphasis, the power of Nature to quiet the passions and elevate the mind of man, and he intimated a deeper thought of divine immanence in the phenomena of Nature. But his great service to the men of his day was that he shut up their books, led them out of their parks, and taught them to look on Nature with enthusiasm. This service is of the greater historical value because it was so well adapted to the times. To begin with, it was a necessary first step. People cannot love what they do not know. Lead them to Nature, teach them to observe with amazement and delight, and the other steps follow in due course in accordance with the power of each soul to receive the deeper influences of Nature. In the second place, men were just ready to take this first decisive step away from the artificial to the natural. The work of the poets who immediately preceded Thomson had been too slight and fragmentary to count for much in the way of influence, yet they were most clear indications of a tendency, a silent preparation of the general poetic mind, for such work as Thomson’s. He was at once and easily understood because, while his poems in their spontaneous freshness and charm, their rich, easy fulness of description, their minute observation, their sweep of view, their unforced enthusiasm, must have come as a revelation, it was a revelation in no sense defiant or iconoclastic. In the main it was a revelation of new delights, not of disturbing theories, or vexing problems. A touch more of subtlety, of vision, of mystery, of the faculty divine, and Thomson might have waited for recognition as Wordsworth did.[327]

John Dyer’s (1700–1758) more ambitious poems, “The Ruins of Rome” (1740) and “The Fleece” (1757), belong to a much later period than the present. Of these the first may be passed over as containing hardly a touch of Nature. The second is a long didactic poem showing much technical knowledge of sheep-raising, weaving, dyeing, and home and foreign trade. It has frequent panegyrics of liberty and simplicity. It abounds with geographical details, and is notable as having so many full and often exact descriptive references to the rivers of Great Britain. The Avon, the Severn, the Thames, the Towy, the Vaga, the Ryddol, the Ystwith, the Clevedoc, the Lune, the Coker, the Ouze, and the Usk are chief among these. He is apparently always conscious of the rivers, rills, streams, or waterfalls in any landscape. But in general the poem is conventional in diction,[328] in the choice of similitudes, and in the occasional descriptions. Its use of geographical details, though sometimes suggestive and stimulating, as in the lines,

Tempestuous regions, Darwent’s naked peaks,
Snowden and blue Plynlymmon and the wide
Aërial sides of Cader-yddris huge,[329]

is more often simply wearisome. It is true of Dyer, as it was of Thomson, that his really excellent poetry of Nature was written when he was fresh from long and familiar knowledge of Nature in her wilder forms, and that travel and contact with men served to dull the power of these early experiences. “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk” were published the same year as Thomson’s “Summer,” and were doubtless written the year before. They could hardly have been a result of the impetus given by Thomson to the study of Nature. They are rather an original and independent contribution toward the same end. They were the expression of personal experience, and the direct outcome of native taste and singularly fortunate environment. Dyer’s life before his school days at Westminster was spent in the wild and romantic country in Carmarthenshire, and during the years immediately preceding the publication of these two poems he was wandering through other parts of South Wales as an “itinerant painter.” His previous study with Richardson had helped to develop that artistic sensitiveness to external impressions so apparent in his early work. He notes the colors and shapes of the trees grouped below him, the gloomy pine and sable yew, the blue poplar, the yellow beech, the fir with its slender, tapering trunk, the sturdy oak with its broad-spread boughs. The changing horizon line as he climbs the hill, the long level lines of the lawn, the various movements of rivers running swift or slow, through sun and shade, the streaks of meadow, the close, small lines of distant hedges, the curling spires of smoke, are observations that show the trained eye.[330] His colors seem to be rather carefully discriminated. Yellow receives unusual emphasis. The linnet’s yellow plumage, the yellow foliage of the beech, the mountain-tops shining yellow in the sun, and even the “yellow barn” catch his eye. This preference for yellow characterizes his later work. He speaks of “yellow corn,” “yellow tillages,” “yellowing plains,” and the “yellow Tiber.” He also liked the words “golden” and “sunny.” Purple is applied to evening and to the groves at evening, and seems to be used with some real sense of the modern specific meaning of the word. In later work the color purple became almost a stock epithet with him;

Purple Eve
Stretches her shadows,[331]

When many-colour’d Evening sinks behind
The purple woods and hills,[332]

The purple skirts of flying day,[333]

When evening mild
Purples the valleys,[334]

Wide abroad
Expands the purple deep,[335]

are typical phrases. He also notices the “thousand flaming flowers” in the fields, the silver and gold of the morning clouds, the shining of lakes, the evening colors reflected in slow streams, and the soft fair hues of distant mountain summits. He delights in the sounds of Nature, especially in the songs of birds. Not for many years after Dyer is there so effective a bit of bird-song poetry as the closing lines of “Grongar Hill.” Nor is he indifferent to odors, for he notes the perfumed breeze from the valley, the fragrant brakes, and the sweet-smelling honeysuckle. It is worthy of note that in these two short poems nearly a hundred natural facts are mentioned.

In this wide observation Dyer includes some features not hitherto counted as parts of a poetic landscape. The “windy summit wild and high,” naked rocks, and barren ground, are mingled with the softer details, and

Each gives each a double charm.

He nowhere dwells upon mountains in his descriptions, but the slight touches here and there and the general tone of the poems are sufficient to show his great delight in mountain scenery. He represents himself as climbing slowly and looking back often so as not to miss a single phase of the view unfolding before him. Once on the top he gazes out over the lovely prospect and exclaims,

Now, even now, my joys run high
As on the mountain turf I lie.

In “The Fleece” are further indications of this love of mountains and wide views. The passage beginning

Huge Breaden’s stony summit once I climbed[336]

is typical.

Those slow-climbing wilds, that lead the step
Insensibly to Dover’s windy cliff,
Tremendous height![337]

and

By the blue steeps of distant Malvern walled,
Solemnly vast.[338]

have something of the modern touch.

The prevailing interest in these poems is in Nature, but there are one or two charming pictures of homely life. The old man’s hut and garden on the edge of the wood, and the barnyard scene are as attractive as they are realistic. And surely the tattered old man digging up cabbage in the shade might have been expected to wait at least for Crabbe or Wordsworth to introduce him into the select company of the Muses. The same may be said of the tramp asleep by the roadside.[339]

In any tabulation Dyer’s use of Nature would seem to be much more abundant than it is for in “The Fleece” he of necessity used a large number of geographical details merely to mark out localities and with no more literary quality than there would be on a map. His chief use of Nature is twofold, and is best seen in the short poems, “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk.” He describes a landscape with loving minuteness for its own sake, and he regards it as the occasion for a strain of half-melancholy reflection on human life. This gentle, quaintly precise moralizing is unlike the typical classical didacticism in that it seems to spring inevitably from the effect of natural objects on the poet’s mind, instead of being itself a main thing and laboriously illustrated by such natural facts as came to hand.

The entire impression made by the two poems is that they were written by one who knew Nature better than books. The negative as well as the positive qualities of the poem show this. There are almost no conventional phrases.[340] Of the personified abstract qualities, two at least, Pleasure and Quiet, are so imaginatively conceived as not to belong to the category of cold classical personifications. The only classical allusion is significant as being to the “fair Castalian springs” “deserted now” by all but “slavish hinds.”[341] But the poems show something more than first-hand as opposed to bookish knowledge of Nature. Their author evidently loved to linger over the charms of Nature in solitude, to let them sink into his mind and heart. There is a power of quiet contemplation, of “wise passiveness,” such as Thomson never knew. The closing lines of “Grongar Hill,”

Be full, ye courts; be great who will;
Search for Peace with all your skill:
Open wide the lofty door,
Seek her on the marble floor,
In vain you search, she is not there;
In vain ye search the domes of care!
Grass and flowers Quiet treads,
On the meads, and mountain heads,
Along with Pleasure, close-ally’d,
Ever by each other’s side:
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill,

show a wonderfully true and delicate apprehension of the spiritual influences that speak through Nature’s forms. It is putting into plainer words what was the underlying conception in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment.”

As has been observed, Dyer speedily left his first love and devoted himself to laborious, didactic blank verse. We cannot find that his two short poems attracted much attention at the time. Thomson’s glory blazed forth so effulgently that lesser lights were but dimly seen. Now, however, as we go from poet to poet of the period, we cannot fail to be impressed by the unusual sincerity, simplicity, and truth with which Dyer wrote of Nature. And we feel that while he lacked Thomson’s power and fertility, he was nearly equal to him in originality, and superior to him in delicacy.

David Mallet’s (1705–65) chief poems in which there is use of external Nature are “A Fragment,” “The Excursion,” and “Amyntor and Theodora.” The undated “A Fragment” reads like a poetical exercise in the style of Dyer’s “The Country Walk” and “Grongar Hill.” The octosyllabic verse, the general plan of a walk at different times of day, the ascent of a hill for the view, the pleasure in the solitude of Nature, the moralizing invocations to Health and Freedom, are all suggestive of Dyer. The description of the noontide woodland retreat, of the forest sounds, and of the poet’s revery are like passages in “The Country Walk,” while both the spirit and form of some passages in “Grongar Hill” are paralleled by such lines as,

On the brow of mountain high
In silence feasting ear and eye,[342]

or,

And then at utmost stretch of eye
A mountain fades into the sky;
While winding round, diffused and deep,
A river rolls with sounding sweep.[343]

“The Excursion” and “Amyntor and Theodora” are interesting because of their relation to the work of Thomson. Thomson and Mallet were students together at Edinburgh, and there was evidently a close literary comradeship between them, which lasted through the first years of their London life. During the summer of 1726 they were both engaged in literary work, the result of which was, on Thomson’s part, “Summer,” and on Mallet’s, about 300 lines of the first canto of “The Excursion.”[344] There was a vigorous interchange of letters concerning the two poems, each author giving advice and criticism on the passages sent him by the other.[345] A comparison of the poems shows numerous resemblances. As an illustration we may take the sunrise with which each poem opens. The order of occurrences is the same in each--night, faint gleams in the east, breaking clouds, rising mists, retreat of wild animals, song of birds, work of shepherds, full rising of sun, praise to God, reflections on the inspiration to be gained from Nature. There are also many curious verbal similarities. In Thomson the meek-eyed _Morn_, mother of _dews_, comes _faint-gleaming_ in the east to destroy night’s _doubtful_ empire, and before the _lustre_ of her face the clouds break _white_ away. In Mallet sacred _Morn pale-glimmering_ comes with _dewy_ radiance through the _doubtful_ twilight and spreads a _whitening lustre_ over the sky. In Thomson the powerful _King of Day looks_ in boundless majesty _abroad_. In Mallet the _King of Glory looks abroad_ on Nature. These are but suggestions of the many unmistakable but baffling and intricately interwoven similarities in the two poems. If we had but these two poems it would be, perhaps, impossible to say which poet exerted the stronger influence. Thomson’s deference to Mallet’s judgment is evident. “Winter” was submitted to him for correction,[346] and the splendid passage on precious stones in “Summer” was an addition proposed by him.[347] Thomson also greatly admired Mallet’s work.[348] Thomson’s work, on the other hand, bears the impress of a genuine enthusiasm and a manysided personal experience, while Mallet’s work reads like that of a facile versifier speaking out of a meager experience and with a forced enthusiasm. At any rate, when we come to “Amyntor and Theodora,” published years after the full edition of “The Seasons,” Mallet is clearly imitative in thought and phrase. The ocean, for instance, is described as “through boundless space diffused, magnificently dreadful.” Again it is “diffused immense,” and “magnificently various.” In its depths “immeasurably sunk,” “ten thousand thousand tribes endless range.” Its stormy waves are “mountains surging to the stars, commotion infinite” and they break in “boundless undulation.” Storms are presaged by “doubling clouds on clouds.” The earth glows with “the boundless blush of spring.” At sunset the sea shines with “an unbounded blush.” A comparison of these phrases with those quoted from Thomson on p. 92, will serve to show in how exaggerated and inartistic a form Thomson’s mannerisms reappeared in the later work of Mallet. Mallet’s work, if it had been first in the field, would have marked a distinct advance in the conception of Nature. As it is he is of real importance as indicating the influence of Dyer, and especially of Thomson.

“The Wanderer” by Richard Savage (1698–1743) appeared in 1729. Of this poem Dr. Johnson says that it was “never denied to abound with strong representations of nature,” but a study of the five long, confused, formless cantos hardly confirms such an opinion. Most of the descriptions, like those of Mallet’s “Excursion,” are of scenes too remote for damaging comparisons with the reality, as of sunrise at the north pole, or of wide prospects from unknown mounts. The various details are brought together with little sense of unity. He called the poem a vision, and he had perhaps a right to dreamlike combinations of facts, but the result is not a contribution to the study of external Nature. His diction is vague and inexpressive. There is large use of stock poetic words, and there are many Thomsonian echoes. Most of the descriptions are tame, classical imitations. They show almost no first-hand knowledge of the country. There is, however, one characteristic of his poetry that cannot fail to arrest the attention, and that is his use of color. Not even Thomson is so lavish with bright tints, and they are sometimes nicely discriminated. Illustrative passages are referred to in the note.[349] He observes the color of “crooked, sunny roads” that change “from brown, to sandy-red, and chalky hues.” He perceives the “green grass yellowing into hay.” His sunset sky has several colors that had not been noted in poetry. Some of the clouds had “the unripen’d cherry’s die;” others were “mild vermilion,” “streaked through white,” and there was in the sky a tinge of “floating green,” the result of the “blue veil’d yellow” of certain distant clouds. In a moonrise picture there are eight colors, besides twelve words indicative of brightness, and that in a description of thirteen lines. The best of these descriptions is that of the peas and beans in blossom. References such as those to the peas that with their “mixed flowers of red and azure” run in “colour’d lanes along the furrows,” and to the beans that after a rain “fresh blossom in a speckled flower” bear the mark of first-hand observation. The same may be said of his brief touches descriptive of the roads and the fields and the sunset sky already referred to. There is also fairly abundant reference to birds, though but a single line,

The bullfinch whistles soft his flute-like note,

exhibits any special felicity in expression. On the whole, Savage is important in the history of the poetry of Nature merely for his detailed insistence on color.

Among the minor poets of this period was Stephen Duck (1705–1756). He spent most of his life on a farm where he early began to write verses which attracted much local attention and finally gained for their author substantial favor at Court. His “Thresher’s Labour” is interesting simply because it is a realistic treatment of a homely English theme.[350] Duck’s poems were popular in their own day, but his treatment of Nature is commonplace.

The poetry of these four years is interesting because it indicates how early Thomson’s influence made itself felt, as in the work of Mallet and Savage; and also because it shows a use of Nature quite unlike Thomson’s and equally significant of coming tendencies, as in the work of Dyer.

THE POETS BETWEEN 1730 AND 1756

The choice of 1756 as the date to mark the close of this period is based on the appearance in that year of Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope.” In the twenty-six years between Thomson’s “Seasons” and this “Essay,” the most important literary works are in prose, as the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, and the theological writings of Butler, Hume, and Warburton. The period is marked by the establishment of numerous periodicals, by the work of editors, and of compilers. The most important poetry of the period was the “Essay on Man,” “Moral Essays,” and “The Dunciad” by Pope. In writing of this sort there is, of course, little use of external Nature. And it has already been shown that the tragedies of Thomson and the later work of Armstrong, Mallet, and Dyer which appeared during these years, either ignore Nature or treat it in a stiff or simply imitative manner. But there are in the twenty-six years poems that are not only in accord with the changing attitude toward Nature, but that distinctly aid in the evolution of the new conception. The chief names are William Somerville (1675–1742), William Shenstone (1714–63), Matthew Greene, (1696–1737), William Collins (1721–59), William Hamilton (1704–54), Edward Young (1683–1765), Dr. Akenside (1721–70), Thomas Gray (1716–71), Joseph Warton (1722–1800), and Thomas Warton (1728–90). There are other authors whose works are not, as a whole, of importance in this study, but who have written single poems of some significance. Some of these minor poets are Samuel Boyse (1708–49), William Whitehead (1715–85), Dr. John Dalton (1709–63), R. Potter (1721–1804), William Mason (1724–97), Francis Coventry (d. 1759?), Richard Jago (1715–81), Moses Mendes (d. 1758), William Thompson (1712?–66?), Joseph Relph (1712–43), John Gilbert Cooper (1723–69), and Robert Blair (1699–1746).

Somerville, “a country gentleman and a skillful and useful Justice of the Peace,” was a mighty hunter in his day, and found, in leisure hours, great pleasure in throwing into blank verse the accumulated wisdom of years in the field. “The Chace” he calls his “bold, instructive song,” and it so well carries out the second epithet as to be of interest only to his “brethren of the couples” to whose kindness he commends it. There is the most minute description of the kinds of hounds, the breeding of dogs, the care of whelps, their habits, their diseases and the best remedies, and the most desirable kennels. In “Field Sports” we have almost as close a description of hawking. Both poems are, however, destitute of any real love of Nature. The diction, except for a free use of canine technicalities, is extremely limited and commonplace; and we look in vain for the occasional happy touch, the felicitous epithet or line, that would indicate any original or appreciative knowledge of the external world. When this vigorous squire went out to hunt he had eyes but for the dogs and the game. His few descriptions are of the conventional type, as:

Hail, gentle Dawn! mild, blushing goddess, hail!
Rejoic’d I see thy purple mantle spread
O’er half the skies, gems pave thy radiant way,
And orient pearls from every shrub depend.[351]

They are weak imitations, lifeless and vague. “Hobbinol” is a disagreeable poem. Its very ugly rural pictures might perhaps rank as realistic studies of English country life, but so far as any country atmosphere is concerned they are of no importance. The smock-race, the wrestling match, the drunken affray, might as well have taken place in any city slums.

Somerville had a catholic taste in poetry. He greatly admired Homer, Virgil, Pope, Allan Ramsay, and Thomson. The last poet he not only admired, but imitated. The passage beginning,

Justly supreme! let us thy power revere,[352]

is a pretty clear echo from Thomson’s “Hymn,” and the closing twenty-five lines of “The Chace” must have been studied from the closing twenty-two lines of “Autumn.” Somerville is noteworthy in the present study only because he wrote on country themes, and imitated Thomson.

Shenstone is a much more important figure in the history of the poetry of Nature. His sensitiveness to the new spirit and his reverence for the old form make him an interesting transitional influence. His “Prefatory Essay on Elegy” shows this Janus attitude and, what is more, his own consciousness of it. “If the author has hazarded throughout the use of English or modern allusions, he hopes it will not be imputed to an _entire_ ignorance, or to the _least_ disesteem, of the ancient learning. He has kept the ancient plan and method in his eye, though he builds his edifice with the materials of his own nation. In other words, through a fondness for his native country he has made use of the flowers it produced, though, in order to exhibit them to the greater advantage, he has endeavored to weave his garland by the best model he could find.”[353] This statement is interesting as being directly opposed to the thought in Gay’s experiment. Both poets mean to hold by the Latin form and use English materials, the one to show that the two are incompatible, the other to show that they may be united. Neither Gay nor Shenstone thought of discarding the Latin form. In the same “Essay” he claims that in his use of Nature he has drawn only on personal experience. “If he describes a rural landskip, or unfolds the train of sentiments it inspired, he fairly drew his picture from the spot; and felt very sensibly the affection he communicates. If he speaks of his humble shed, his flocks and his fleeces, he does not counterfeit the scene; who having (whether through choice or necessity, is not material) retired betimes to country solitudes, and sought his happiness in rural employments, has a right to consider himself as a real shepherd. The flocks, the meadows and the grottoes are _his own_, and the embellishment of his _farm_ his sole amusement. As the sentiments, therefore, were inspired by Nature, and that in the earlier part of his life, he hopes they will retain a natural appearance.” This plea for first-hand observation is important because it is the most direct of the early critical remarks on the poetical treatment of Nature.

Shenstone’s delight in Nature was evidently genuine. He grants that men may be dazzled by the city;

But soon the pageant fades away!
’Tis nature only bears perpetual sway,[354]

and they learn again

the simple, the sincere delight--
Th’ habitual scene of hill and dale,
The rural herds, the vernal gale,
The tangled vetch’s purple bloom,
The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.[355]

He speaks with scorn of those “bounded souls” who enjoy in Nature only the satisfaction of present needs, or the prospect of future gain, and who cannot on “the mere landscape” feast their eyes, and apostrophizes them thus:

Athirst ye praise the limpid stream, ’tis true:
But though, the pebbled shores among,
It mimic no unpleasing song,
The limpid fountain murmurs not for you.
Unpleas’d ye see the thickets bloom,
Unpleas’d the spring her flowery robe resume;
Unmov’d the mountain’s airy pile,
The dappled mead without a smile.

But to the true lover of Nature,

Lo! not an hedge-row hawthorn blows,
Or humble harebell paints the plain,
Or valley winds, or fountain flows,
Or purple heath is ting’d in vain:

For such the rivers dash the foaming tides,
The mountain swells, the dale subsides;
Ev’n thriftless furze detains their wandering sight,
And the rough, barren rock grows pregnant with delight.[356]

Shenstone also defends the doctrine that beauty is its own excuse for being.

Let yon admir’d carnation own,
Not all was meant for raiment, or for food,
Not all for needful use alone.[357]

Though Shenstone’s work is often undeniably tame and diffuse, and though his interests were bounded by his farm, he is of significance because of his thorough enjoyment of quiet country places, his indignant rejection of the utilitarian view of Nature, and his courageous plea for truth to English scenes.

Greene’s chief poem, “The Spleen,” was published in 1737, after his death. The subject is not one that would lead to much use of Nature, but there is at least one picture that cannot be passed over.[358] In his sketch of the ideal life he describes his ideal home. Its surroundings are most charming and natural, and the whole scene, in its unity and reality of effect, contrasts well with such fanciful combinations as the garden in Tickell’s “To a Lady before Marriage.” One line in this description,

Brown fields their fallow sabbaths keep,[359]

is remarkable in that, in so few words, it not only presents a complete picture, but also awakens the feeling that would be excited by the scene itself.

Hamilton’s chief use of Nature is in gentle little allegories of life. “The Rhone and the Arar,” though a description of two rivers, is obviously didactic in all its details. Spring, summer, and winter in Ode III are but “moral shows,” spread out for man’s instruction. Though Hamilton’s scenes are usually of the soft, delicious, vaguely pleasing sort, and his diction largely classical, yet now and then in his rather monotonous spring poetry we find a fresh line or phrase, as when he comments on spring’s gift of beauty to “each nameless field.” He finds joy in the prickly briar rose, the bright-colored weed, the lion’s yellow tooth, in a thousand flowers never sowed by art.[360] He is filled with gratitude as he looks upon the smiling face of Nature and the radiant glories of the sky, or listens to the music of the opening year.[361] In “Contemplation” he exclaims,

Mark how Nature’s hand bestows
Abundant grace on all that grows,
Tinges, with pencil slow unseen,
The grass that clothes the valley green;
Or spreads the tulip’s parted streaks.

More distinctive, however, than this love of the spring-time world, is Hamilton’s sense of communion with Nature. The lines,

As on this flowering turf I lie,
My soul conversing with the sky,

and this address to the passions that tyrannize over him,

This grove annihilates you all.
Oh power unseen, yet felt, appear!
Sure something more than nature’s here,

are new evidences of the spirit that animated Lady Winchilsea, Dyer, and Parnell.

Hamilton’s most important poem is “The Braes of Yarrow.” In this ballad there is a remarkable blending of external Nature with the tragedy of love and death. The use of the phrase, “the Braes of Yarrow,” in the refrain adds a curiously subtle touch to the pathos of the poem. Tradition had so closely associated the sloping hills and the winding stream of Yarrow with stories of unhappy love in far-off days that the name was in itself enough to strike the keynote of pathos in Hamilton’s ballad. The tone or color that human experience had once given to the scenery was carried on by that scenery so that it became the appropriate background for a new tale of grief. The one descriptive stanza,

Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass,
Yellow on Yarrow’s banks the gowan,
Fair hangs the apple frae the rock,
Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowan;

and a single line in the maiden’s lament,

I sang, my voice the woods returning,

are an appropriate setting for the happy love of the bonny bride and her comely swain. But Nature is also compelled, as it were, to share in the grief, and is implicated in the crime. On Yarrow’s rueful flood floats the body of the slain knight; her doleful hills echo the cries of sorrow. And the desolate bride prays that rain and dew may forever forsake the fields where her lover was so basely slain. The descriptive element in Hamilton’s ballad is of further interest as having suggested some of the details in Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Unvisited.”

“The Deity,” a poem by Samuel Boyse, and much praised in its own day,[362] is of importance here merely because of its Thomsonian imitations, and because of its conception of God in Nature. This conception is, in the main, the typical classical one, as in “Omnipotence,” where the central idea is,

What hand, Almighty Architect, but thine
Could give the model of this vast design?

In “Providence,” however, the modified classical conception is apparent, the ever-working power of God being dwelt upon. All Nature is represented as being each moment derived from the Creator.

The sun from thy superior radiance bright
Eternal sheds his delegated light;
Thou shedd’st the tepid morning’s balmy dews,

are characteristic lines.

That Boyse was an admirer of Thomson we know from the lines addressed to him,

When nature first inspired thy early strain
To paint the beauties of the flowery plain;
The charming page I read with soft delight,
And every lively landskip charmed my sight.[363]

In reading Boyse it is difficult to point out exact echoes from Thomson, but the impression remains that certain passages, especially in “Glory,” are, in spite of their couplets, but weak paraphrases of some portions of Thomson’s work, noticeably “The Hymn.”

Young’s literary career lasted from 1713 to 1762. His “Ocean” and “Sea Pieces” and the only book of the “Night Thoughts” (1742–45), in which there is much use of external Nature, have already been briefly characterized. They need little further discussion here. The preface to “Ocean” is more worthy of note than the poem itself. In this preface Young deprecates slavish following of the models of antiquity, declaring that “originals only have true life.” Due deference to the great standards of antiquity requires that “the motives and fundamental method of their working” should be imitated rather than the works themselves. He then defends his choice of the ocean as a subject, saying that it is, like the subjects chosen by the ancients, both national and great, and adds the significant phrase, “and (what is strange) hitherto unsung.” “The crude ore of romanticism” which Mr. Gosse finds in Young, has to do with his despairing attitude toward life and death, not with his attitude toward external Nature. His love of darkness, which seems at first thought akin to the sentimental melancholy of the romantic poetry, is really an unemotional choice of a fit background for his visions of gloom. His strongest lines on night represent not its beauty, nor its melancholy, but its divinity, or, rather, its theological import. The following are typical:

Let Indians ...
... the sun adore:
_Darkness_ has more divinity for me;
It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul
To settle on herself.[364]

By night an atheist half-believes a God.[365]

At night the sense of sacred quiet is “the felt presence of the deity.”[366] In occasional passages Young has more or less definite previsions of scattered ideas in later poetry,[367] but these are incidental, and of merely curious interest. Taken in the bulk, his work is so slightly and coldly concerned with the outer world as to offer no real contribution to the new feeling for Nature.

Collins possesses many of the qualities and the defects of the romantic spirit. He made plans almost as comprehensive and visionary as those of Coleridge. His indolence, his wavering, irresolute disposition, his morbid sensitiveness, the intensity of his emotions, his love of liberty, his passion for “high romance and Gothic diableries,” together with his new sense of the mystery of Nature, set him quite apart from the men who were his friends, from Dr. Johnson, Armstrong, Aaron Hill, from Garrick, Quin, and Foote, even from Thomson. His interests were not those of his day, for his admiration turned to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, rather than to Virgil and Horace.[368] In English poetry he gave his allegiance to Spenser, Milton, and Shakspere, rather than to Dryden and Pope.[369] He was devoted to music. He was also deeply interested in the remote history of his own country, and in the legendary lore and superstitions of any land. Dr. Johnson says of him: “He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens.”

Collins was a town-bred poet and could have known little of the country at first hand. We might therefore expect all his imagery to be of the conventional sort in the “Eclogues” written in his early school days. But such is not the case. In the later poems the use of Nature, slight as it is, is marked by unusual originality and imaginative power. There is everywhere present a sense of delight in the wilder, freer, in the more remote and mysterious, aspects of Nature. He makes Fear sit

in some hollow’d seat
’Gainst which the big waves beat,

and listen to

Drowning seamen’s cries in tempest brought.

His gifted wizard seers

view the lurid signs that cross the sky
Where in the west the brooding tempests lie,
And hear their first, faint, rustling pennons sweep.

Note also the description of the “wide, wild storm,” in the “Ode to Liberty,” and especially the skilful mingling of landscape details and superstitious terrors in the “Ode on Popular Superstitions.” The “bewitch’d, low, marshy, willow brake,” “the spot where hums the sedgy reed,” the “dim hill that seems up-rising near,” “Uist’s dark forest,” “the watery strath or quaggy moss,” “the damp, dark fen,” are slight touches, but they serve perfectly to suggest the fit home of the kelpie, the will-o’-the-wisp, the mischievous fairy folk, and the phantom train of gliding ghosts. But Collins’ most appreciative use of Nature is in the “Ode to Evening (1746).” That poem was doubtless the result of personal experience, for it notes facts, such as the rising of the beetle in the path at twilight, that were not yet stock poetical property. The lines,

Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,

could hardly have been written by one unfamiliar with the slow disappearance of a landscape as night comes on. More remarkable are the simplicity and directness of touch by which the few details are made to stand for complete pictures. The cloudy sunset, the silence of evening, the calm lake amid the upland fallows, the fading view, the windy day in autumn, are all excellent examples of the stimulative as opposed to the delineative description. But the final impression made on the mind is powerful mainly because in some way that escapes analysis the very mood and spirit of evening, its calm, its tender melancholy, breathe through the unpretending lines. We seldom find in the eighteenth century, personifications so high and spiritual, description so essentially poetical, or workmanship so perfect in its simplicity.

Dr. Akenside’s “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” though not published till 1744, was begun in 1738 when the author was but seventeen, and completed when he was twenty-one. In 1757 it was remodeled and many additions were made. In its first form the poem was essentially a product of the author’s precocious, brilliant youth. Yet it has little of the fire and passion of youth. It is a smooth, correct, rather frigid exposition of certain philosophical principles. The whole poem seems like an illustration of Akenside’s belief that poetry is true eloquence in meter.[370] It is not marked by any especially rich or faithful portrayal of Nature, nor is there much description. In point of fact, such descriptions as occur are often marred by eighteenth-century periphrases such as calling honey “ambrosial spoils;” the sun, “the radiant ruler of the year;” flowers, “the purple honors of the spring;” water, “a delicious draught of cool refreshment;” and frogs, “the grave, unwieldly inmates of the neighboring pond.” There is also frequent use of stock words and of worn-out similitudes. But in spite of its coldness, this poem is an important contribution to the development of the poetry of Nature because of its new conception of the relation between man and Nature.

When the poet endeavors to explore the “secret paths of early genius,” he imagines inspiration as coming to the lonely youth from some “wild river’s brink at eve,” or from “solemn groves at noon,”[371] and there is one passage that lays a Wordsworthian emphasis on the effect of Nature on the soul of a child: