These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but the aim of them is undeniable and noteworthy. A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic obsession, and in examining the claim of the Wartons to be pioneers, we naturally look for this element. We find it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas was only seventeen--the precocity of the brothers was remarkable--he wrote a "Pleasures of Melancholy," in which he expresses his wish to retire to "solemn glooms, congenial to the soul." In the early odes of his brother Joseph we find still more clearly indicated the intention to withdraw from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of the spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of foreshadowing the theories of Rousseau, to which I have already referred, produces an effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style. In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the picturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of "the pine-topped precipice Abrupt and shaggy." There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that "God and Nature link'd the general frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same." Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live "With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt The boar and tiger through savannahs wild, Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves," indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the "little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale" in Pope's complacent _Fourth Epistle_, but an æolian harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.