is a brief poetic statement of the creed afterward elaborated in Wordsworth’s “Primrose on the Rock” and Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” The thought back of the lines is the one in Wordsworth’s mind when he looked on “the meanest flower that blows.” It is this underlying consciousness of essential spiritual unity in all existence that gives to the work of both Blake and Wordsworth its subtle power. There could hardly be two more dissimilar ways of approaching Nature than those of John Scott and William Blake. They stand at opposite poles, the one with no sense of unity, no power of poetic fusion or interpretation, but with a wide, accurate, and often picturesque assemblage of natural facts; the other with a prevailing tone of unreality and mysticism, a fine scorn of the actual, but with a swift recognition of the spirit of Nature, and an abiding sense of cosmic unity. Yet each represents a characteristic phase of the new feeling for Nature as seen in Wordsworth. On the one hand, the practiced eye and the inevitable ear; on the other, the vision and the faculty divine. In its significance as a prophecy of Wordsworth and Shelley, the early poetry of William Blake is of especial importance. Crabbe’s poetry falls into two periods, the first one closing with “The Newspaper” in 1785, and the second beginning with “The Parish Register” after an interval of twenty-two years. In the first of these periods we find but slight use of external Nature. The occasional similitudes are of a formal conventional type. The two longest descriptive passages are of a dismal winter scene,[462] and of some sterile summer fields that mock man’s need with profitless blooms.[463] There is no expression of pleasure in Nature. It is her pitiless, anti-human aspects that Crabbe sees. The charm of Nature independent of utility seems to have no meaning for him. He consciously repudiates Clear skies, clear streams, soft banks, and sober bowers, Deer, whimpering brooks, and wind-perfuming flowers, as unworthy poetic material.[464] Rough or barren Nature as the background or occasion of man’s misery is the thought of these early poems.