But if we wish to find in Milton the pure breath of the country, the fragrance of the fields, it is to his early poems we must return. In these, scholar and man of letters though he was, learning and art had not excluded Nature, but with his eye still resting on actual sights of the country, he describes them with a native lightness and grace which his classic style only makes more expressive. During the life of Milton, other though lesser poets had given expression to the love of Nature. Such were William Browne, author of “Britannia’s Pastorals,” and Andrew Marvell, whose “Poems in the Country” contain here and there graceful expression of rural things. But after Milton died (1674), rural life and Nature, for more than half a century, disappeared from English poetry. CHAPTER XII. RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON. The divorce from Nature and country life which marked the Poetry of the closing seventeenth and opening eighteenth centuries, has often been subject of comment, and need not detain us now. Whatever the causes of this divorce may have been, it is beside our present purpose to inquire into them. Enough to note the fact that during the latter part of Charles II.’s reign, and during the succeeding reigns of William, Queen Anne, and the first George, poetry retired from the fields, and confined herself to the streets of London. If she ever ventured into the country at all, she did not wander beyond the Twickenham villa or Richmond Hill. While first Dryden and then Pope were in the ascendant, the subjects of poetry were those to be found in city life and in social man. Nature, Passion, Imagination, as has been said, were dismissed; politics, party spirit and argument, wit and satire, criticism and scientific inquiry, took their place.