"Th' effusive South Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.[53]... Thus all day long the full-distended clouds Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth Is deep enriched with vegetable life; Till in the western sky, the downward sun Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam. The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes The illumined mountain; through the forest streams; Shakes on the floods; and in a yellow mist, Far smoking o'er the interminable plain, In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems. Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around."[54] This is emphatic, but it is also opulent. In this air and this vegetation, in this imagination and this style, there is a heaping up, and, as it were, an impasto of effaced or sparkling tints; they are here the glistening and lustrous robe of nature and art. We must see them in Rubens--he is the painter and poet of the teeming and humid clime; but we discover it also in others; and in this magnificence of Thomson, in this exaggerated, luxuriant, grand coloring, we find occasionally the rich palette of Rubens. Section VI.--The Beginnings of the Modern Age All this suits ill the classical embroidery. Thomson's visible imitations of Vergil, his episodes inserted to fill up space, his invocations to spring, to the muse, to philosophy, all these pedantic relics and conventionalisms, produce incongruity. But the contrast is much more marked in another way. The worldly artificial life, such as Louis XIV had made fashionable, began to weary Europe. It was found meagre and hollow; people grew tired of always acting, submitting to etiquette. They felt that gallantry is not love, nor madrigals poetry, nor amusement happiness. They perceived that man is not an elegant doll, or a dandy the masterpiece of nature, and that there is a world beyond the drawing-room. A Genevese plebeian (J. J. Rousseau), a Protestant and a recluse, whom religion, education, poverty, and genius had led more quickly and further than others, spoke out the public secret aloud; and it was thought that he had discovered or rediscovered the country, conscience, religion, the rights of man, and natural sentiments. Then appeared a new personality, the idol and model of his time, the man of feeling who, by his grave character and liking for nature, contrasted with the man at court. Doubtless the man of feeling has not escaped the influence of the places he has frequented. He is refined and insipid, melting at the sight of the young lambs nibbling the newly grown grass, blessing the little birds, who give a concert to celebrate their happiness. He is emphatic and wordy, writes tirades about sentiment, inveighs against the age, apostrophizes virtue, reason, truth, and the abstract divinities, which are engraved in delicate outline on frontispieces. In spite of himself, he continues a man of the