The neo-classical poetry proper was not without verse which partly satisfied these conditions; direct contact with nature was never entirely lost. Wordsworth, as we know, gave honourable mention[254] to “The Nocturnal Reverie” of Anne, Countess Winchilsea, written at the very height of the neo-classical supremacy, in which external nature is described with simplicity and fidelity, though there is little trace of any emotion roused in the writer’s mind by the sights and sounds of outdoor life. And every now and then, amid the arid and monotonous stretches of so much eighteenth century verse, we are startled into lively interest by stumbling across, often in the most obscure and unexpected corners, a phrase or a verse to remind us that Nature, and all that the term implies, was still making its powerful appeal to the hearts and minds of men, that its beauty and mystery was still being expressed in simple and heartfelt language. Thomas Dyer’s “Grongar Hill” has already been mentioned; it was written in 1726, the year of the publication of Thompson’s “Winter.” Dyer, for all we know, may have the priority, but in any case we see him here leading back poetry to the sights and sounds and scents of external nature, which he describes, not merely as a painter with a good eye for landscape, but as a lover who feels the thrill and call of the countryside, and can give exquisite expression to his thoughts and emotions. We have only to recall such passages as Who, the purple evening lie, On the mountain’s lonely van; or even his tree catalogue, The gloomy pine, the poplar blue, The yellow beech, the sable yew, The slender fir, that taper grows, The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs; or How close and small the hedges lie; What streaks of meadow cross the eye! or A little rule, a little sway, A sun-beam on a winter’s day, Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave— to recognize that already the supremacy of Pope and his school of town poets is seriously threatened. Here too is a short passage which might not unfairly be assigned to Wordsworth himself. Would I again were with you, O ye dales Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands, where, Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides And his banks open, and his lawns extend, Stops short the pleased traveller to view, Presiding o’er the scene, some rustic tower Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands: O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook The rocky pavement and the mossy falls Of solitary Wensbeck’s limpid stream, How gladly I recall your well-known seats Beloved of old, and that delightful time When all alone, for many a summer’s day, I wandered through your calm recesses, led In silence by some powerful hand unseen. It is from Mark Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Bk IV, ll. 31 foll.). And so, too, is this: