[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian. He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch yeoman," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_ whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made no further excursions into the Middle Ages. [37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." --_Essay on Criticism_. [38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739. CHAPTER IV. The Landscape Poets There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the "beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer. Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a whole, was far from romantic.