Gilpin studied Nature according to the rules of art, because, as he said, these rules were drawn from Nature. No man resented more quickly than he the transforming hand of man in natural scenes. If lands must be turned to agricultural uses, if fields must be marked off, he only wishes that it might be made as little apparent as possible. He hates “a multiplicity of glaring temples” in a landscape. He thinks most so-called adornments in private grounds are mere “expensive deformity,” and he calls regular clipped hedges “objects of deformity.” He apologizes for his severe strictures on several estates in the Cumberland region by saying that the grand natural scenes so filled his thought that he could not restrain his contempt for mere embellished, artificial ones. Such passages are an emphatic indication of the revolution in taste since the days of the formal garden. Here is a characteristic sentence written as they leave the Lakes: “Here the hills grow smooth and lumpish, and the country at every step loses some of the wild strokes of Nature and degenerates, if I may so speak, into cultivation.” Not infrequently Gilpin turns from the painter’s study of the scene, and gives something of its poetical quality. In speaking of the appeal made by the Lake Country to the imagination he says, “No tame country, however beautiful, however adorned, can distend the mind like this awful and majestic scenery.” Of “Ulzwater” on a perfectly serene day he says, “So solemn and splendid a scene raises in the mind a sort of enthusiastic calm which spreads a mild complacence over the breast, a tranquil pause of mental operations which may be felt but not described.” And again in his “Essay on Picturesque Travel,” We are most delighted when some grand scene, though perhaps of incorrect composition, rising before the eyes, strikes us beyond the power of thought--when the _vox faucibus haeret_ and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect, this _deliquum_ of the soul, an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure overspreads it. We rather feel than survey the scene. These last passages inevitably recall Wordsworth’s analysis of his own emotions before a beautiful view when Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired, or the better-known lines in “Tintern Abbey.” Gilpin, if we take the whole extent of his work, represents the new spirit more fully than any of the other early travelers. He notes the permanent and the evanescent. He observes color, form, and motion. The technical quality of his descriptions does not seriously interfere with the impression they give of pleasure in free, wild Nature, and he again and again shows himself capable of an imaginative communion with Nature.