The best descriptions are not, however, of estates, but of grand natural scenes. It is views from Persfeld on the Why (Wye);[533] the wild country along the Tees; the English Lakes; the waterfalls and wild glens near Powerscourt; the mountains and lakes of Killarney, that really stir him. Such spots he describes with an enthusiasm that never flags. He is tediously minute. He cannot let a detail escape. And through all there is an eager, overflowing delight, a rapturous pleasure in wild scenery such as we find in no traveler before Young except Brown. He broods over a fine landscape. He is unwilling to lose one of its possible charms. At Derwentwater he rows all around the lake, around each island, stops to hunt up unseen waterfalls, climbs all crags that promise fine views. He is indefatigable. No peril stops him. He wonders why the people of Keswick do not at once cut paths to the fine views so that no one need miss them. As he climbs Skiddaw he laughs with scorn as he mentally compares “the effects of a Louis’ magnificence to the play of nature in the vale of Keswick.” His exclamation, “How trifling the labors of art to the mere sport of nature!” certainly marks a rebound from conventional standards. The view of “Winandermere” from the heights on the eastern shore is, he thinks, “the most superlative view that nature can exhibit” or, if not, she is “more fertile in beauties” than his imagination can conceive. “To ride the eighteen miles from Bernard Castle to the falls of the Tees one could well afford,” he says, “a journey of a thousand miles.” He rides out to Haws Water. He makes a close study of Hulls Water. The whole region holds him with a fascination nowhere repeated till he finds himself, ten years later, among similar wild scenes in Ireland. Here, almost forgetting that he is a scientific farmer in search of information, he wanders along the picturesque banks of the Liffey, the Boyne, the Nore, the Boyle, visits Lake Ennel, Loch Earne, the lakes of Killarney, and writes descriptions in the manner of the most voluminous and ardent of modern sightseers. Young’s significance in this study rests not so much on any artistic excellence of expression as on his wide observation, his personal enthusiasm for Nature, and his early date. The next traveler of importance was Thomas Gray. The openness of Gray’s mind to pleasure from the external world is hardly at all indicated in his poetry. In his prose we find it especially in the “Journal in the Lakes” in 1769. Thirty years before this, his “Journal in France” had given some hint of his taste for wild scenery, but at that time, though he expressed great pleasure in the “magnificent rudeness” of the Alps, he had not entirely broken away from the current conceptions and the current phraseology, as is shown by the sentence: “You here meet with all the beauties so savage and horrid a place can present you with.”