"Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had in mind were probably these (191-94): "Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air, Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs That, uttered by the demon of the night, Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748), "Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest." Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death. Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it