Chapter II · INDICATIONS OF A NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE IN THE POETRY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In this chapter the method of work is quite unlike that in the preceding study. The typical and the dominant are not regarded. Attention is rather converged upon the significant exception. We are led into nooks and corners and byways. The most famous author is not necessarily the one on whom emphasis is placed. In searching for legitimate proof of a tendency we may safely turn to the work of men of unoriginal genius and moderate power. A study of this sort would certainly give a distorted view if it were for a moment thought to represent the period as a whole. But if it is held in mind that the attitude toward Nature was in general through the eighteenth century marked by indifference and artificiality, we may throw as high lights as we please on the exceptions. This study will serve its purpose if, in its following-out of the complexities and inconsistencies that make a transition period interesting, it shall succeed in showing that, along with the classical feeling toward Nature, there was also a real and vital love for the out-door world, and that this new attitude toward Nature is marked by first-hand observation, by artistic sensitiveness to beauty, by personal enthusiasm for Nature, by a recognition of the effect of Nature on man, and, occasionally, by an imaginative conception of Nature somewhat in the Wordsworthian sense.

The new attitude toward Nature, of which Thomson is the first adequate exponent, finds occasional and not ineffective expression during the two decades before the publication of “Winter” in 1726. In the works of John Philips (1676-1709), Ambrose Philips (1675–1749), Lady Winchilsea (1661–1720), John Gay (1685–1732), Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), William Pattison (1706–1727), Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), Robert Riccaltoun (1691–1769), and Dr. Armstrong (1709–1779), we become more or less definitely aware of a new outlook on the external world.

Dr. Johnson praised John Philips’ poem “Cyder”[199] because it had the “peculiar merit” of being “grounded in truth.” On the whole this poem is of the didactic classical order, but here and there among the minutely accurate horticultural precepts we come upon indications that the poet was not insensible to the charms of Nature in other than its utilitarian aspects. His delight in color may be seen from his specific descriptions of apples. The pippin is “burnish’d o’er with gold;” the red-streak “with gold irradiate and vermilion shines.” “Plumbs” are “sky-dyed.” He notes the “Ore, Azure, Gules,” and the blending of colors in the rainbow. He observes the contrast between fields yellow with grain, and green pasture land. And he sees the colored edges of clouds when the sun breaks through. There is also apparent a sensitiveness to odors. He speaks of cowslip-posies “faintly sweet,” of odorous herbs, of the fragrance of apples on a dewy autumn morning, and of “the perfuming flowery bean.” Mr. Shairp credits Thomson with being the first poet to mention the fragrance of the bean fields,[200] but Philips is at least twenty years ahead of Thomson in noting this fact.

We see further indication of Philips’ enjoyment of Nature in a few lines,

which were perhaps the earliest expression in the eighteenth century of that pleasure in high hills and wide prospects that was so marked a characteristic of later poetry. Philips’ explanation of the satisfaction he found in an early morning walk, namely, that the mind perplexed with irksome thought is calmed by the influence of Nature,[202] seems like a prophecy of the thought afterward dominant concerning man’s indebtedness to Nature.

In Ambrose Philips’ “Pastorals” we find a mingling of first-hand observation and classical imitation. His references to the ancients, his amoebean contests, the supposed effect of the death of Albino on the external world, the emphasis on dangers from heat and the nightly wolf, the frequent use of cumulative comparisons,[203] and, in general, the form of his “Pastorals,” show how closely he was held by conventional ideas. Furthermore, his facile use of Nature is always determined by his attitude toward some pastoral nymph or swain. He rejoices to paint an idyllic background for some Rosalind. He heaps up images from Nature to express the amorous praises of some Colinet. He has no conception of a relation between man and Nature more intimate than the highly artificial one of his “Pastorals.” What is of importance in his poetry is the fact that in the midst of his imitations and conventionalities are many true and charming observations drawn entirely from English country life and not found in earlier eighteenth-century poetry. His work is, to be sure, rendered weak and childish by two unpleasant mannerisms in diction: his use of adjectives ending in “y,” as “bloomy,” “dampy,” “bluey,” “steepy,” “purply,” and so on, and his use of diminutives such as “kidlings,” “lambkins,” “younglings,” “firstlings,” and “steerlings.” But on the whole we find in his poems a more full and accurate knowledge of Nature than is at all common in the poetry of the time. He notes the fleeting, dusky shadows cast by moving clouds, the glossiness of plums, the blue color of mists, the sweet odors of morning, the moaning of the night wind in the grove, the sportive chase of swallows, the loud note of the cuckoo, the speckled breast of the thrush, and the song of the blackbird “fluting through his yellow bill.” He usually calls flowers, trees, birds, and other animals by their specific names, and he seldom extends his list beyond his own probable observation. That Philips had a genuine love for Nature in her milder forms is further seen from the preface to his “Pastorals.” “As in Painting,” he says, “so in Poetry, the country affords not only the most delightful scenes and prospects, but likewise the most pleasing images of life.” He loved the songs of birds because the “sedate and quiet harmony” of their simple strains gives “a sweet and gentle composure to the mind.” And he was conscious of an “unspeakable sort of satisfaction” when he saw “a little country-dwelling, advantageously situated amidst a beautiful variety of hills, meadows, fields, woods and rivulets.”

Lady Winchilsea is, in the study of the poetry of Nature, the most significant of the minor poets before Thomson. She was a friend of Rowe and Pope, and was honored by complimentary verses from them.[204] She is known now chiefly because of Wordsworth’s reference to her,[205] and through the poems published in Ward’s “English Poets.”[206] Three of the poems there given, “The Nightingale,” “The Tree,” “A Nocturnal Revery,” have to do with Nature. With these exceptions the eighty-one poems in the collection of 1713[207] are thoroughly classical in their form and spirit, though unmarked by any preponderance of artificial fancies. But these three short poems are remarkable productions when thought of in connection with their author’s poetical environment. They are the earliest eighteenth-century poems in which Nature is frankly chosen as the theme, and they show a personal knowledge that must have been the accumulated result of many experiences.

The observation in “The Nightingale” is especially truthful and sympathetic. That there is no attempt to describe the bird is an omission justified by the fact that the nightingale is seldom seen.[208] The two characteristics noted in the bird’s song are its exceeding sweetness and its sadness, or rather, its sense of pain.[209] A comparison of the phrases in the note will show that Lady Winchilsea listened with the hearing ear of a true poet. But we cannot fail to notice as well that the song is not fully heard or reported. In the other poets we find represented a richness, a fulness, an ecstasy, a tumult, not even hinted at in Lady Winchilsea’s poem.[210] Nor does she mention the passion most poets have heard in the song.[211] But however incomplete the impression received may have been, the poetical record of what was perceived is both truthful and vivid. She seems to write as she listens and the reader follows the variations of the song through their effect on her own mind.

In the fifty-two lines of the poem on Night twenty-two natural facts are recorded. Some of these would not escape the most careless, but only close observation would discover such details as the sleepy cowslip, the grass standing upright, the unusual strength of odors, the clearer sound of falling waters, the horse’s audible cropping of the grass, the waving moon seen in the stream, and the distant call of the curlew. Lady Winchilsea’s love of Nature was of the most unambitious sort. To have seen the stately tree, to have heard the nightingale, to know all she did about night, would not have called her beyond the gates of her own park. But her joy in Nature needed no strong or novel stimulus. It is her distinction that she had fixed an “exquisite regard” on the commonest facts of the external world, and that she spoke quite clearly and simply from her own life. Hence her knowledge had the new quality of being specific and local and accurately defined.

Still more noteworthy is Lady Winchilsea’s spiritual sensitiveness to Nature. Such a phrase as “the mysterious face of heaven” marks a new conception of the sky. Night is no longer “the parent of fears” but a time whose solemn quiet suggests a strange and subtle sense of something too high for syllables to speak. Nature is to her no mere background for human life. Man is influenced by Nature. His rage is disarmed. His spirit is led to feel a sedate content. And sometimes in moments of especial insight there is revealed to him in the inferior world an existence “like his own.” Not often before Wordsworth is there so distinct a prevision of his way of looking at Nature.[212]

In the slow turning of English poetry from the artificial to the natural John Gay was distinctly helpful, yet the reader of “Trivia,” “The Fan,” “The Epistles,” the “Fables,” and even the “Eclogues” would hardly suspect their author of knowing, in any close way, any life outside the city. It is only in “Rural Sports,” written when he was twenty-eight, and “The Shepherd’s Week,” when he was twenty-nine, that we find any real study of Nature. In “Rural Sports” hunting and especially fishing are described with the enthusiasm and technical accuracy of an expert. There is no hint of the feeling toward animals that made Thomson and Cowper abhor hunting. There is simply a thoroughly sportsmanlike knowledge of details, a sense of pleasurable excitement in the chase, and joy in victory. This delight in open-air pursuits is often far enough removed from any real love of Nature, and is here of much less significance than casual passages showing Gay’s love of the world about him. He tells us that it was his habit to take morning walks through the fields,[213] that at sunset he often strayed out to the cliffs near Barnstaple, and lingered to watch the glowing colors of the sunset, and the later beauty of an “unclouded sky” bright with stars and a silver moon that marked a glittering path along the sea.[214] Gay’s love of Nature was largely confined to the milder aspects, but he seems not to have been entirely indifferent to hills. In speaking of Cotton Hill in North Devonshire he said,

In six or seven unimportant passages Gay speaks of hills or mountains, apparently using the words interchangeably, but not in a manner indicating much knowledge of them. Yet such little pictures as that of the dawn when the sun “strikes the distant eastern hills with light,” or that of “the evening star shining above the western hill,” show some recognition of hills as an attractive part of a landscape. Gay knows flowers and birds and trees with some definiteness. He speaks of many domestic animals. He notes colors and odors.[216] He observes the lengthened shadows stretched across the meadows in the late afternoon, the long flight of crows seeking the wood at sunset, the streams “wrinkled”[217] by a fresh breeze, the yellow showers of leaves in autumn. Abundant and varied as is this use of Nature, it is not marked by especial delicacy of feeling or accuracy of observation. But for all that “The Shepherd’s Week” is a notable piece of work, and it is in these pastorals that we find Gay’s real service. Whether meant as a friendly aid in Pope’s castigation of Ambrose Philips or not, these poems were unquestionably meant as a good-humored satire on pastorals that ventured to deal truthfully with English rustic life. The Latin form was counted the ideal one for pastoral. To this form Gay held, evidently with the conscious purpose of suggesting the Latin at every turn. Then he filled in this mold with the homeliest, most realistic details of English country life.[218] The plain, practical truth of these details is simply amazing as will be seen from the passages indicated in the note. See also the flowers brought in, the primrose, kingcup, clover, daisie, gilliflower, mary-gold, butter-flowers, cowslip, and others; and the animals, the witless lamb, frisking kid, udder’d cow, clucking hen, waddling goose, squeaking pigs, worrying cur, whining swine, paddling ducks, guzzling hogs, and others; and the country sports, as romping in the fields, blindman’s buff, hot cockles, swinging, and others.[219] In Pastoral IV is an assemblage of curious country superstitions; in Pastoral I are given signs of rain; in Pastoral V are funeral customs; and in Pastoral VI an account of the favorite country songs. These poems are a veritable treasure-house for the student of folklore. They might also serve as a diary of country occupations. Take for example Bumkinet’s reminiscences of Blouzelinda’s life in Pastoral V. In such a wood, he remembers, they gathered fagots. There he drew down hazel boughs and stuffed her apron with brown nuts. In another place he had helped her hunt for her strayed hogs, and as they drove the untoward creatures to the sty had seized the opportunity to tell his love. At the dairy he had often seen her making butter pats, or feeding with floods of whey the hogs that crowded to the door. In the barn as he plied the flail, he had watched her sift out food for the hens. In the field she had ranged the sheaves as he pitched them on the growing mow. The object of these pastorals was to show the absurd incongruity between the Latin form with its suggestions of Arcadian days, and the roughness of English country life. The result was unexpected. Readers in general, indifferent to scholarly congruities, were delighted with the novelty, the air of freshness and truth, in the pictures scattered through the “Pastorals.” Poetry had suddenly and without meaning to do it, gone from the city and the park to the very plainest and most matter-of-fact sort of country people and country occupations, and had somehow made them attractive. Blouzelinda and Buxoma are not in the same order of beings as the traditional Phyllis and Chloris, and they are equally far removed from the vulgar repulsive country wenches in Swift’s coarse satires. They are real beings with a charm of their own, and the love they inspire in Lobbin Clout and Cuddy is an everyday, quite comprehensible affair.

The dirge for Blouzelinda indicates well the covert laugh with which Gay wrote these descriptions of country life. The clergyman said

After the funeral the men trudged

This sense of fun is everywhere apparent, and shows how unwittingly Gay broke a lance in a new cause. Yet some parts of his Preface are startlingly modern in their plea for truth to Nature. Here is a passage which, so far as its spirit is concerned, might have been said by either Crabbe or Wordsworth.

Thou wilt not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or, if the hogs are astray, driving them to the styes. My shepherd gathereth none other nosegays but what are the growth of our own fields; he sleepeth not under myrtle shades, but under a hedge; nor doth he vigilantly defend his flock from wolves for there are none.

Whatever Gay meant to do, he really did accomplish what his Preface states as his aim. He turned poetry away from the “insipid delicacy” of the conventional pastoral, and truthfully represented the “plain downright hearty cleanly folk” of rustic England. And external Nature, though nowhere dwelt upon for its own sake, is everywhere present and so vividly portrayed, that the reader had what was certainly a poetic novelty at that day, “a lively landscape of his own country, just as he might have seen it, if he had taken a walk in the fields at the proper season.”

The use of external Nature in Parnell’s poems has narrow limits. There is no mention of winter, autumn, or summer. Mountains are merely noted in passing as disagreeable features in the poet’s dreary surroundings in Ireland. There is but one line about the sea. Wild scenery of whatever sort is ignored. The only storm is described in some conventional lines in “The Hermit.” There is almost no record of specific knowledge of trees, or flowers, or birds. There are few indications of openness to sensuous impressions from specific forms, colors, odors, sounds. But in spite of these widely inclusive negations, Parnell is of distinct importance as a poet of Nature. He has, to begin with, some accurate first-hand observation. He speaks once of the “differing green” of trees in spring. He describes a fern with some minuteness. There are two charming descriptions of banks and skies reflected in clear water.[220] Other fresh observations are,

or this of the close of a storm,

Such lines are of value for they indicate, though they are few in number, some power of direct vision and of restrained, simple expression.

Parnell’s distinctive excellence is, however, along different lines. He records not facts but impressions. He is essentially a poet of the spring; he felt intensely all the glad, abundant life of the early year. But there is not a description of spring in his poems. He gives instead curiously happy descriptive touches that suggest far more than they say.

Note such lines as,

or

or

There is a lilt in such lines, a joyousness, an off-hand certainty of touch, not in keeping with the customary cold and labored descriptions of spring.

Of still greater significance is Parnell’s literary use of Nature. In the “Night Piece” the external scene serves as an appropriate background for the thought presented. The few natural facts are so well chosen and so delicately touched that all the moral reflections seem permeated with an appropriate out-of-doors atmosphere. The calm, perfect beauty of the picture of night with its closing suggestions of mystery and sadness, the fading of the pale moon, and the sounds that come over the long lake, fit exactly the course of the poet’s melancholy meditation and contribute to it. The gay, light pictures in the “Hymn to Contentment” are equally well suited to the spirit of joyous praise with which that poem concludes.

Bishop Jebb has pointed out for the enjoyment of the “classical and pious reader” the similarity between the moral reflections in this poem and those in Cardinal Bona’s “Divina Psalmodia.”[227] Parnell’s close adherence to the thought of the cardinal in the didactic part of the poem, and the fact that the last forty-two lines, the ones that deal with Nature, are entirely Parnell’s own, give striking proof of the originality of his thought concerning the external world and its power over the human heart. It is in these lines that we find his most subtly suggestive conception of Nature. He represents himself as sad at heart. He seeks contentment in earthly pomp, in the paths of knowledge, in solitary search after diverting scenes in Nature, but in vain. At last he goes to a wood, and as he yields himself to the influence of the place becomes suddenly aware that in this quiet spot the true spirit of contentment is speaking to him wise lessons of self-control and communion with God. In gratitude for the joy that has come to him through Nature he utters a song of praise to the “source of all Nature,” but as he looks about him on the glad world, he feels that his song is merely an expression in words of the great chorus of thanksgiving going always silently up from sun and moon and stars, from seas, woods, and streams.

Such work as this is indeed remarkable before 1713; and for spirituality and insight, for what has well been called “a sense of the thing behind the thing,” it was many years before it was paralleled.

“The Morning Contemplation” is the only one of Pattison’s poems that has much to do with Nature. It was written, his friend tells us, on the banks of a river where the young poet used to wander, endeavoring to attune his verses to the smoothness and harmony of the stream. He was especially sensitive to the “sadly pleasing melancholy” of moonlight nights and solitary walks, and he was one of the first poets to express a longing for solitude with Nature. Gilded rooms of state, the purple slavery of towns, rob him of the bliss he finds in the living forest. When alone in the spacious fields he thinks himself almost a god. Even little scrubby thorns are to him more pleasing objects than courts can show. Nature charms his senses and soothes his soul; she is his best teacher, and he trusts her plain instructions.

reads like a crude prevision of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.” The “excellent morality” of “The Morning Contemplation” is much in the vein of Dyer’s “Grongar Hill.” Every fact in Nature arouses some thought or some emotion. By contrast or analogy it suggests human life, as in the lines,

Pattison’s poem is of real importance, because its early date[228] ranks it as probably the first of the eighteenth-century poems that treat of Nature in the romantic, sentimental, fervid fashion afterward brought to its culmination by the Wartons.

Allan Ramsay’s education was of the most limited sort, so that, in early life at least, the development of his genius was unbiased by a knowledge of Latin and Greek or even English models. After he was fifteen he lived in Edinburgh and there began to be infected by the pseudo-classicism of his day. The poems in which country scenes and people were most fully represented were, however, pretty clear and unadulterated records of his early experiences in the secluded mountainous district of Lanarkshire where he was brought up. The best poems of this sort are the pastoral dialogues, “Patie and Roger,” 1721, and “Jenny and Meggy,” 1723, or rather, “The Gentle Shepherd,” 1725, which is a combination of the two pastorals thrown into completer dramatic form. A second edition of “The Gentle Shepherd” appeared in the same year as Thomson’s “Winter.”[229] It is worthy of note that the service rendered by Gay to English poetry is in many respects paralleled by Allan Ramsay’s contributions to Scottish song. There are in Ramsay’s pastorals similar closely studied scenes from peasant life, wherein are minutely described the superstitions,[230] the household customs,[231] the out-door occupations,[232] the trials,[233] and the pleasures[234] of the homely folk among the hills of Scotland. But there are important differences. What Gay did lightly and without serious intent was with Ramsay a service of love. He was not laughing in his sleeve at the very truth he so capitally portrayed. Throughout his work there is, in general, an air of sincerity. It is as if Gay wrote from the point of view of an outsider with an unfailingly keen eye, and a quick sense of humor. But Ramsay wrote from a life that he had known and loved, and that he thoroughly respected.[235] There are occasional false notes in his pastorals. He gives his shepherds flutes and reeds; his comparisons, especially his cumulative similes, are conventional; he makes rather stiff use of personification; and his desire to make his hero and heroine well born interferes with the pastoral simplicity of the drama. But these are extraneous and hardly affect the real texture of the work.

We find in Ramsay’s poems occasional hints that his presentation of homely Scottish scenes and people was not merely instinctive, but that it was in some measure a deliberate choice. In “Tartana,” written in 1721, he said that his chosen muses were those that wandered through the clover meadows and the groves along the smooth meandering Tweed or by the gentle Tay, or where the haughty Clyde roared over lofty cataracts.

And again, protesting against the narrowness of poetic rules and customs, he said,

and he called a wide, wild garden where all sorts of plants grew in wanton confusion, a paradise made by Nature herself. Even more emphatic is his Preface to “The Evergreen” in 1724. In commendation of the poems he had collected he said,

The morning rises as she does in the Scottish horizon. We are not carried to Greece or Italy for a shade, a Stream, or a Breeze.... I find not Fault with these Things, as they are in Greece or Italy: But with a Northern Poet for fetching his Materials from these Places, in a Poem, of which his own Country is the Scene; as our Hymners to the Spring and Makers of Pastorals frequently do.

Ramsay’s use of external Nature is more charming than Gay’s. Scottish poetry had never, in its attitude toward the out-door world, passed through so barren and arid a period as that of the pseudo-classicism in England, nor had the Scottish people ever lost their sense of the beauty and especially of the mysterious power of glens and braes and burns. So Ramsay’s love of Nature was not without a considerable background in the way of national poetic spirit. He spoke out in fresh, true words what everybody knew, and described scenes familiar to every eye. There are, however, distinct limitations in Ramsay’s knowledge of Nature and his power of sympathetic representation. His recognition of colors is fresh and charming, but elementary, like that shown in ballads. “Caledonian hills are green,” “beneath a green shade,” “the simmer green,” “a green meadow,” “my native green plains,” are characteristic phrases.

and

are almost the only instances of any other color than green. Such phrases as “scented meadows,” “sweet scented rucks,” “new blown scents,” “sweetest briar,” “blooming fragrance,” show the same simple, undifferentiated recognition of odors. A few lines as,

are more specific representations of sounds, but we do not often find words so discriminating. His references to trees, flowers, and birds are of the same general, limited sort. There are “bonny haughs” and “bonny woods;” there are rising plants, primroses, daisies, and gowans; there are “quiristers on high,” the merle, the mavis, and the lark. But there is no subtle, detailed observation. It is the open, frank, spontaneous joy of a child happy in the glad world about him. Ramsay’s best lines are descriptive of shining days, clear heavens, dancing streams. “The sun shines sweetly, a’ the lift looks blue,”[240] “ae shining day,” “ae clear morn of May,” “the morning shines,” “the lift’s unclouded blue,” “fair simmer mornings” indicate the general atmosphere of the scenery introduced. Occasional closer touches are seen in such lines as,

and

Best of all are the lines about streams;

are descriptions almost perfect of their kind. In their beauty and freshness they show that the eye was on the object. Mr. Shairp says of Habbie’s How, “A pool in a burn among the Lowland Hills could hardly be more naturally described,” and one need not be a Scotchman to feel sure that the same is true of the minor descriptive touches.

Though Ramsay was brought up in a rugged part of Scotland, he seems to have had none of the modern feeling for mountains. But he speaks of “black, heathery mountains,” of “northern mountains clad with snow,” of “mountains clad with purple bloom,” and of hills that “smile with purple heather.” Once he exclaims,

and he notes that

Such passages, though they show no love for the mountains, are yet sufficiently picturesque and exact to save Ramsay from the imputation of never having seen the wild country around him. To the ocean he gives but a single line,

It is interesting to note that in Ramsay as in Gay, Nature is made subordinate to man, in the sense that the pictures from Nature are nowhere elaborated or dwelt upon ostensibly for their own sake. The main interest is in the study of the characters.

The chief contribution of Gay and Ramsay to the growing love of Nature in poetry had to do with the natural man in natural scenes, rather than with the natural scene itself. Gay’s service in the way of external Nature was largely the outcome of his fidelity to the fact. Ramsay did more. He not only gave separate pictures both beautiful and true, but he somehow fused them with the human elements of his pastoral in such a way that we cannot think of the racy love-scenes apart from their fresh and lovely surroundings.

In 1725, or shortly before, were written three poems on Winter.[250] They are important as marking the first real turning from the softer to the sterner aspects of Nature. Dr. Armstrong’s poem was inspired by a winter spent among the wild romantic scenes about the River Esk. His later poetry is not important so far as the use of Nature is concerned. He became a great admirer of Thomson whose style he imitated with some success, but he shows little of Thomson’s sensitiveness to natural beauty. His point of view is that of the physician and his hatred of the town is based on his objection to smoke and bad air,[251] while his summons to the mountains rests on the value of exercise and oxygen.[252] One of the most effective passages is his apostrophe to the Liddal, that stream “unknown to song, where he played when life was young.”[253] The only poem on which we need to dwell is the “Winter,” which, though often unintelligible from its inflated and periphrastic form of expression, has yet a rugged vigor and originality. It shows occasionally a homely realism suggestive of Crabbe, as in the description of the shivering clown. The observation is most of it first-hand. The description of the birds that, when the storm comes on,

suggest Thomson’s famous redbreast. Note also the truth of lines such as these:

or these:

or, to strike a lovelier note, this closing hint of the coming spring:

The whole poem is characterized by a delight in the wildest phases of winter weather and it shows an originality of conception, a fulness of observation, and an occasional strength of expression remarkable in a boy not yet sixteen.

Riccaltoun’s “A Winter’s Day” is chiefly remarkable because its author was a friend of Thomson in his boyhood and doubtless helped to cultivate his taste for Nature; because it was this poem that suggested Thomson’s descriptions of winter; and because winter was at that time a new poetic theme. The “masterly touches” of which Thomson speaks are hard to find unless he referred merely to the rough truth in the catalogue-like summaries of natural facts. A discussion of Thomson’s “Winter” will come more naturally in the next section.

In this study of the period preceding Thomson we have still to notice the indications that even Pope and Addison were not left untouched by the new spirit. Such indications, however, show but faintly in their poetry. Addison’s “Cursus Glacialis” (1699) was written in Latin, and the few descriptive lines are purely conventional. It is simply an attempt to show that the vigorous sports of winter

Pope’s “Pastorals” appeared in Tonson’s “Miscellany” in 1709. They were enthusiastically received, and apparently considered a charmingly natural presentation of country life. Wycherley called Pope’s Muse “a sprightly lass of the plains,” and said, that “in her modest and natural dress she outshone all Apollo’s court ladies in their more artful, laboured, and costly finery.”[254] But no assemblage of such contemporary judgments could convince a modern reader that these poems show any real traces of a conception of the outer world unlike that of the classicists. “Windsor Forest” (1713) must be more carefully noted, both because of Wordsworth’s implied commendation[255] in his reference to the “passage or two” that contain new images of external Nature, but chiefly because it is, as Courthope observes, the first “professed composition on local scenery” since Denham, and Marvell.[256] The poem was written at two different times. The first 290 lines have to do with the country. They were written in 1704, at about the same time as the “Pastorals.” Although this part of the poem purported to be the outcome of daily rides in Windsor Forest, the descriptions are so vague and general that most of them would fit any other spot as well. The lines that show personal observation are certainly few. What passages Wordsworth meant can only be surmised. He may have had in mind the description of the pheasants. But more exact observation is shown in the references to the doves flocking on the naked, frosty trees, the flight of the clamorous lapwing, the trembling of trees reflected in a stream, and the purple heather.[257] That Pope had some desire to conform to the truth in representing English scenery is indicated by his doubt as to the advisability of referring to the vintage in describing an English autumn.[258] And when he revised his poems he omitted “blushing,” as not being applicable to violets,[259] and “wolves,” as not belonging to England.[260] Warton points out, also, that in adapting a Latin description of the Eurotas to serve him in a description of the Thames, he changed “laurels” to “willows”.[261]

In spite of these indications of a desire to be true to Nature, it is to Pope’s prose rather than his poetry that we must turn for any real influence in favor of simplicity and truth in the presentation of natural facts. Though in reading Pope’s letters every statement is instinctively taken cum grano salis, because of his known insincerity and striving after effect, we now and then strike passages that have a genuine tone of pleasure in such mild forms of Nature as his physical condition enabled him to know.[262] Addison’s “Essays” also show real delight in the milder forms of the external world. “A beautiful prospect,” he says, “delights the soul as much as a demonstration.” “A man of polite imagination often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the possession.”[263] We note, too, his pleasure in wide views,[264] in sunset,[265] and in spring.[266] He also deprecated the use of pagan mythology as meaningless in the poetry of a Christian nation,[267] and he heartily praised Ambrose Philips’ attempts to confine English pastorals to English scenes.[268] And finally, both Pope and Addison were strong influences in bringing about the change from the formal to the natural school of gardening.[269]

SUMMARY

In a statement of the influences in this period that make for a new spirit toward Nature we must not forget that it was in reality a classical period, most of its tendencies and all of its best work being classical. The indications of the new spirit are fugitive, occasional, and usually unconscious. With this proviso, we may sum up the new tendencies. The change from the formal to the natural school of gardening was begun in this period, and owed much to Pope and Addison. The artificial shepherds and shepherdesses of the conventional pastoral were supplanted by real English and Scottish peasants, as in the work of Ambrose Philips, Gay, and Ramsay. There was a growing sense of the beauty and charm of the external world, as in Lady Winchilsea, Parnell, and Ramsay. In most of the poets mentioned in this period there was a new quickness and minuteness of observation leading to a wider knowledge of natural facts. There was appreciative recognition of new aspects of Nature, as night and winter. There was not lacking a hint of the romantic note of melancholy which later became one characteristic of the poetry of Nature. And there was recognition of the spiritual potencies in the external world. There was also an occasional self-conscious statement of new principles, as humorously in Gay, seriously in Ramsay, and casually in Pope and Addison.

THE POETS BETWEEN 1726 AND 1730

James Thomson (1700–1748) is confessedly the most important figure in the early history of Romanticism. He foreshadowed the new spirit in various ways, as in his strong love of liberty, his constant plea for the poor as against the rich, his preference for blank verse, his imitation of older models, especially Spenser, and in his tendency toward comprehensive schemes; but his chief importance is in his attitude toward external Nature. If, however, we take into consideration all his work, we shall find in more than three-fourths of it the utmost apparent indifference to Nature. In the five tragedies written between 1738 and 1748 there is no hint that their author knew more of the world about him than the veriest classicist of them all. In “Alfred” (1740), written by Thomson and Mallet, there are occasional descriptive touches, but these are almost too slight to mention when we think what effects might have been produced in a play the action of which occurs on a beautiful wooded island inhabited only by a few peasants. In the other tragedies Nature is drawn upon merely for conventional similitudes, as in “Edward and Elenora” (1739), where five of the eleven similitudes are the comparison of rage or fierce passions to tempests; or in “Sophonisba,” an earlier play (1728), where there is not a fresher or more forceful comparison than that of an army to a torrent, passion to a whirlwind, the hero to a lion, and the heroine to a blooming morn. In the 3,300 lines of the tedious poem, “Liberty” (1734–36), not more than fifty refer to external Nature, and of these the only passages that suggest, even remotely, the author of “The Seasons” are the descriptions of the sullen land of Sarmatia[270] and the shaggy mountain charms of the Swiss Alps.[271] “The Castle of Indolence,” written in 1733, is the only one of the poems written after 1730 that indicates any genuine love of Nature. The charm of this poem for modern readers is perhaps largely due to its use of external Nature, for, though there is little of the rich, elaborate description characteristic of “The Seasons,” what there is, is so exquisitely appropriate that all the listless, luxurious life of this land of soft delights is seen through a romantic and picturesque setting of waving, shadowy woods, sunny glades, and silver streams. Yet a closer study of the descriptive stanzas shows little more than a musically felicitous combination of the attributes conventionally recognized as belonging to a pleasing landscape. The only lines really indicative of a love of Nature such as the classicists had not known are the following from the second canto:

It is to “The Seasons” (1726–30) that we must go if we wish to understand Thomson’s work as a poet of Nature. A brief analysis of the study of external Nature in these poems will serve to show both in what respects Thomson’s work was the outcome of a new spirit, and in what respects its affiliations are with the old.

An important part of Thomson’s poetical endowment was his quick sensitiveness to the sights and sounds and odors of the world about him. He looked on Nature with the eye of an artist, but not of an artist in black and white. It was not form but color that attracted him. There are occasional descriptions, as of the garden in “Spring”[273] and of the precious stones in “Summer,”[274] where the lines glow like a painter’s palette, and throughout “The Seasons” there is a general impression of rich and varied coloring. That this impression is stronger than a list of the color terms used would seem to justify is due to two facts, both characteristic of Thomson’s work in general. In the first place he did not care for nicely discriminated shades or delicate tints. He loved broad masses of strong, clear color. He dwells with ever new delight on blue as seen in the sky or reflected in water, and on green, “smiling Nature’s universal robe.” In the second place he is especially rich in such words as indicate color in general without specification as to the kind. “The flushing year,” “every-coloured glory,” “the boundless blush of spring,” “the innumerous-coloured scene of things,” “unnumbered dyes,” “hues on hues,” are typical phrases. Motion also caught his eye more quickly than form. The dancing light and shade in a forest pathway, the waving of branches, the flow of water, the rapid flight or slow march of clouds, the golden, shadowy sweep of wind over ripened grain, count for much in the pleasurable impression made upon his mind by different scenes.

It is evident that Thomson received more through his eye than through his ear, but he was very far from being indifferent to the sounds of Nature. The hum of bees, the low of cattle, the bleating of sheep are frequently noted. The songs of birds, while often represented by some general phase, as “the music of the woods,” or “woodland hymns,” are now and then more minutely specified, as in the fine description of the “symphony of spring.”[275] There is also effective representation of the sounds heard in storms, as in the summer thunderstorm.[276] The most frequent sounds are, as is inevitable in an English poet whose facts come from actual observation, those made by water, as the plaint of purling rills, the thunder of impetuous torrents, or the growling of frost-imprisoned rivers.

While Thomson was not the first poet to speak of the odor of the bean-flower, his words show a keen appreciation of that perfume, and certainly the “smell of dairy” was a country odor first poetically noticed by him. His sensitiveness to odors is not especially marked, yet it is safe to say that he was in this respect more observant than his immediate predecessors or contemporaries.

In reading the poetry of Nature after Dryden in historical sequence, there is, in coming to “The Seasons,” a sudden sense of freedom and elation, a sense of having at last come upon a poet who writes freely and spontaneously from a large personal experience, whose facts press in upon him even too abundantly. He knows many kinds of Nature and under varying aspects. His garden picture, though somewhat too much in the floral catalogue style, shows how well he knew the cultivated flowers he described, and he speaks with no less loving minuteness of furze, the thorny brake, the purple heather, dewy cowslips, white hawthorn, and lilies of the vale. It is a pleasure to see how much he knew about birds. He describes their habits with remarkable accuracy and minuteness. He shows their tender arts in courtship,[277] their skill in nest-building,[278] and the “pious frauds” whereby they lure away the would-be trespasser.[279] In no poetry between Marvell and Thomson do we find birds so fully described, and Marvell has nothing so charming and sympathetic as Thomson’s winter redbreast.[280] Thomson’s scope is also wider in that he knew the birds of the seashore[281] as well as those of wood and meadow. Equally close attention is given to the various domestic fowl. The peacock had flaunted his painted tail through poetry for a hundred years, and is now for the first time outranked as an object of interested observation by the hen, the duck, and the turkey.[282] The frequent descriptions of domestic animals, especially the sheep,[283] the horse,[284] and the ox,[285] also show minute knowledge such as could not have been gained from books. It is, moreover, a significant fact that through these numerous and varied studies there runs a genuine love for animals. Thomson was, at least in poetic theory, a vegetarian, and he vigorously denounced the killing of animals for food as conduct worthy only of wild beasts.[286] His poetical invectives against hunting are as vigorous as Cowper’s.[287] He objects to caging birds,[288] and his indignation waxes high over the bees “robb’d and murder’d” by man’s tyranny.[289] The only unoffending animal that escapes Thomson’s wide sympathy is the fish.[290] The skill with which the monarch of the brook is lured from his dark haunt and at last “gaily” dragged to land is described with a gusto in curious contrast to the pity lavished on the tortured worm that may have served for bait.[291]

As we have just seen, the animals that Thomson described were those that any country lad might know rather than those that had been canonically set apart for poetical service. The same independent judgment is evident in his study of other neglected realms in the world of Nature. He gloried in storms and winter. Though he now and then falls into the conventional phraseology, and speaks of winter as drear and awful, he yet in the same breath exclaims that he finds its horrors congenial. The contrast of a first winter in London turns his mind with full emphasis to the days of his youth when he wandered with unceasing joy through virgin snows, and listened to the roar of the winds and the bursting torrent, and watched the deep tempest brewing in the grim sky. Such experiences he remembers with joy for they “exalt the soul to solemn thought.”[292] Through all the descriptive portions of the “Winter” there is a vigorous, manly enthusiasm as tonic and bracing as the bright, frosty days themselves. Thomson’s pleasure in the sterner phenomena of Nature is further shown by his evident delight in tracing the progress of any storm, whether the thunder storm of summer,[293] the devastating wind and rain of autumn,[294] or the black gloom of a winter tempest.[295] These fierce tempests certainly are of more comparative importance in “The Seasons” than they are in Nature. Their frequent choice may be in part due to their dramatic qualities of rapidity and force. The crashing and hurtling of the elements was a subject not unsuited to Thomson’s splendid but ponderous and swelling style. But in the main it is only fair to suppose that he wrote of storms well because he had many times watched them with an interest that had made him remember them.

With many other aspects of Nature was Thomson familiar. He knew much of the sky both by day and by night. His few short descriptions of the starry heavens are worth more than all Young’s far-sought epithets.[296] One phrase concerning the radiant orbs

seems a conscious turning away from the old artificial conception. One of the finest moonlight passages[298] is reminiscent of Milton in two lines,

but the close,

is Thomson’s own, and is a good example of the full sweet harmony that marks his verse at its best. There are many passages and apparently casual phrases indicative of the closeness with which he watched clouds.[299] The doubling fogs that roll around the hills and wrap the world in a “formless gray confusion” through which the shepherd stalks gigantic is described with a Wordsworthian felicity and precision.[300]

The descriptions referred to below of early morning,[301] of sunset,[302] of evening,[303] and of night[304] may be perhaps taken as among the best examples of their sort in “The Seasons.” As a whole they show conclusively from what long intimacy with Nature Thomson wrote. The very freshness of morning breathes from the sunrise picture in “Summer” and the little picture in “Autumn” is more delicately suggestive than many a more pretentious description of the dawning day. The sunset after the rain in “Spring” is one of the best examples of Thomson’s power to paint word pictures. It would be difficult for any canvas to present a scene at once so mellow and radiant, and so transfused with the joy of a renovated earth. As exquisite in their way are the descriptions of the slow approach of “Sober Evening” with her circling shadows and the softly swelling breeze that stirs the stream and wood; and the later description of the strange uncertain mingling of light and darkness in a summer night in England. These passages and others that might be quoted show to what fine issues Thomson’s pen was sometimes touched, but it cannot be denied that his really intimate and exact knowledge of Nature and her ways could not hold all his descriptions subject to the charm of simplicity and truth.

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.

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.

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

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,

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

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

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,

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;

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

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,

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

is typical.

and

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,”

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,

or,

“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,

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:

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,

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;

and they learn again

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:

But to the true lover of Nature,

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

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,

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,

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