There is about the whole ode a subdued twilight tone, a remoteness from men and human things, and a pensive evening musing, all the more expressive, because it does not shape itself into definite thoughts, but reposes in appropriate images. And, as the Aldine biographer observes,—“The absence of rhyme leaves the even flow of the verse unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contributes to the effect.” In Thomson there was probably an observation of the facts of Nature wider and more varied, but in Collins there is an intermingling of human feeling with Nature’s aspects which is at once more delicate and deep. The increased sensibility to Nature which in English poetry appeared in Thomson, was carried on through the eighteenth century to its close by Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and manifested itself in each of these poets in a way characteristic of himself. GRAY. In Collins we have seen Nature described with a perfect grace of language and a penetrating of the forms and colors of things with human sentiment, that far outwent the minute and faithful descriptions of Thomson. This same movement was maintained, I cannot say advanced, by Gray. That he had a fine feeling for Nature is apparent in his letters, which show more minute observation and greater descriptive power than his poetry. In these the beautiful scenery around the Westmoreland Lakes finds the earliest notice. In dealing with scenery, as with other things, Nature without Art, and Art without Nature, are alike inadequate. To hit the balance is no easy task. To let in Nature fully upon the heart, by means of an art which is colorless and unperceived—this English poetry was struggling toward, and Gray helped it forward, though he himself only attained partial success. Often the art is too apparent; a false classicism is sometimes thrust in between the reader and the fresh outer world. Wordsworth has laid hold of a sonnet of Gray’s as a text to preach against false poetic diction. And yet Gray, notwithstanding his often too elaborate diction, deserves better of lovers of English poetry than to have his single sonnet thus gibbeted, merely because, instead of saying the sun rises, it makes “Reddening Phœbus lift his golden fire.”