the beauty and peace of the outward world bring him so much emotion that his verse becomes spontaneous and tender. But for the most part he wants the simplicity of description which passionate love of Nature produces, and, above all, the sweetness and pathetic truth that comes of self-consciousness being lost in the life of Nature. We stand only on the threshold of the new world when we read Thomson. He has none of that solitary emotion for Nature herself which complains and creates and trembles with its own excitement in Shelley; none of that intense quiet of enjoyment which broods like sunlight over Wordsworth's soul when he steps into a nook in the woods, and treads lightly lest he should disturb its living spirit.

For there is as much difference between the feeling of Thomson about Nature and the conventional coldness of his descriptions, and the feeling of a poet like Shelley, as there was between Thomson and Pope. It is worth while to compare them at the same work. Here is Thomson treating an autumn noon,

For now the day

O'er heaven and earth diffused, grows warm and high,
Infinite splendour! wide investing all.

How still the breeze! save what the filmy threads

Of dew evaporate brushes from the plain.

How clear the cloudless sky, how deeply tinged

With a peculiar blue! The ethereal arch

How swelled immense, amid whose azure throned

The radiant sun how gay-how calm below

The gilded earth!

Contrast the note of that-how heavy, elaborate and yet how true in parts, how unemotional-with this, and think how wonderful the change,—

Noon descends around me now:
"Tis the noon of Autumn's glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolvéd star

Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon's bound
To the point of heaven's profound,
Fills the overflowing sky:
And the plains that silent lie

Underneath the leaves unsodden
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-winged feet
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines
Piercing with their trellised lines
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less
Pointing from this hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one;

And my spirit, which so long

Darkened this swift stream of song,

Interpenetrated lie

By the glory of the sky;
Be it love, light, harmony,

Odour, or the soul of all

Which from heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.

It is not a development of the former, it is a different thing altogether. In Thomson, the poet stands apart and apostrophises Nature; in Shelley, the poet is absorbed into Nature, and his voice is the voice of Nature herself. Whatever theology Shelley had about Nature would

naturally, owing to this interpenetration of himself and her, become Pantheistic; or would be content, since delight was so great, not to know and not to care whether it were love from without, or his own mind from within, that made or peopled the universe; but Thomson's theology of Nature, because he was not interpenetrated by her, would recognize a separate First Cause. His nearness to Pope would also lead him to share in the systematic view of the universe, but this would be deeply modified in him by his close study of natural beauty. He sees the world no longer only as a great order under a great Governor. He sees it as full of varied landscapes of infinite beauty, and each of these as the work of God-as revelations of His character. He hovers round, though he does not clearly touch, the thought of Nature as a living personal image of God. He has begun that separation of Nature from Man which led afterwards to the half pantheistic theology of Nature that Wordsworth worked out, to the wholly pantheistic theology of Shelley.

The impulse given by Thomson to the study of Nature went on increasing. That migration of the poets from the town to the country, of which I spoke, began: men visited the more accessible parts of England and recorded their impressions; Dyer's "Grongar Hill" is the record of a landscape in South Wales; his "Fleece," and Somerville's "Chase," are both descriptive poems, but they are too slight to contain any theology of Nature. Foreign travel next enlarged the sphere of love of Nature. Everyone knows the letters of Gray, and remembers the lucid simplicity and directness, mingled with the fastidious sentiment of a scholar, of his description of such scenes as

the Chartreuse. That is a well-known description, but those in his journal of a "Tour in the North" have been neglected, and they are especially interesting since they go over much of the country in which Wordsworth dwelt, and of which he wrote. They are also the first conscious effort-and in this he is a worthy forerunner of Wordsworth-to describe natural scenery with the writer's eye upon the scene described, and to describe it in simple and direct phrase, in distinction to the fine writing that was then practised. And Gray did this intentionally in the light prose journal he kept, and threw by for a time the refined carefulness and the insistance on human emotion which he thought necessary in poetic description of Nature. In his prose then, though not in his poetry, we have Nature loved for her own sake.*

I insert here two of these descriptions; they may perhaps induce some to read Gray's letters, and few letters in the English language are so good:-"I walked out under the conduct of my landlord to Borrodale. The grass was covered with a hoar frost, which soon melted and exhaled in a thin bluish smoke. Crossed the meadows obliquely, catching a diversity of views among the hills over the lake and islands, and changing prospect at every ten paces; left Cockshut and Castlehill (which we formerly mounted) behind me, and drew near the foot of Wallacrag, whose bare and rocky brow cut perpendicularly down above 400 feet, as I guess, awfully overlooks the way; our path here tends to the left, and the ground gently rising, and covered with a glade of scattering trees and bushes on the very margin of the water, opens both ways the most delicious view that my eyes ever beheld. Behind you are the magnificent heights of Walla-crag; opposite lie the thick hanging woods of Lord Egremont, and Newland valley, with green and smiling fields embosomed in the dark cliffs; to the left, the jaws of Borrodale, with that turbulent chaos of mountain behind mountain, rolled in confusion; beneath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining purity of the lake, just ruffled by the breeze enough to show it is alive, reflecting woods, rocks, fields, and inverted tops of mountains, with the

It was different, as I say, in his poetry. The exquisite choice and studious simplicity of the natural description in such poems as the "Elegy," and the "Ode to Eton College" is the result of Art, more than of the pure imagination; and Gray weighed every word, especially every adjective, till he reached what I suppose to be his ideal that every line was to suggest a sentiment and a landscape. We feel, then, too much the art and too little the emotion in his work; but then work like this introduced an ideal of style and expression into our poetical language about Nature-a demand for perfection-which it has never since lost, but which it never, white buildings of Keswick, Crosthwaite Church, and Skiddaw for a back-ground at a distance."

"Mr. Gray to Dr. Wharton.

"Past by the little chapel of Wiborn, out of which the Sunday congregation were then issuing. Past a beck near Dunmailrouse, and entered Westmoreland a second time, now begin to see Helm-crag, distinguished from its rugged neighbours, not so much by its height, as by the strange, broken outline of its top, like some gigantic building demolished, and the stones that composed it flung across each other in wild confusion. Just beyond it opens one of the sweetest landscapes that art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains spreading here into a broad bason, discovers in the midst Grassmere-Water; its margin is hollowed into small bays with bold eminences, some of them rocks, some of soft turf, that half conceal and vary the figure of the little lake they command. From the shore a low promontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white village with the parish church rising in the midst of it; hanging enclosures, corn-fields, and meadows green as an emerald, with their trees, hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water. Just opposite to you is a large farm-house at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn, embosomed in old woods, which climb half-way up the mountain side, and discover above them a broken line of crags, that crown the scene. Not a single red-tile, no flaring gentleman's house or garden walls, break in upon the repose of this little unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty in its neatest and most becoming attire."