existing poetry and his statement of his own aim in the Preface to his “Amoebaean Eclogues,” Crabbe’s expressed determination to treat of Nature as it really is, Cowper’s pleasure in the fact that his knowledge and inspiration come straight from Nature and his persistent reiteration of his belief in the superiority of the country over the city, and finally Burns’ many critical remarks on the essential qualities of descriptive poetry. The characteristics of the poetry of Nature that was growing up during the eighteenth century have been already indicated in one way and another, but it seems necessary here to gather them up into general statements. The easiest and clearest way will be to make a somewhat detailed summary of such traits of this poetry as seem to foreshadow the later treatment of Nature, especially as exemplified in Wordsworth. In the comparison I keep mainly to Wordsworth both for the sake of simplicity, and because, though in romantic periods each poet works out his own salvation along original and self-determined lines, yet Wordsworth more nearly than any other poet expresses the variety and complexity of interest in the new feeling toward Nature. Wordsworth said that a part of his endowment as a poet was a peculiar openness to sense impressions, and that this endowment was cultivated by his environment in youth until the real facts of Nature were perceived by him with fulness and accuracy. In his wholesale condemnation of the period between “Paradise Lost” and “The Seasons” the chief count in the indictment is the absence of new images drawn from Nature. Full, accurate, first-hand knowledge of Nature is then with Wordsworth a _sine qua non_, a basis on which interpretation must rest. During the eighteenth century no one man had Wordsworth’s inevitable ear or practiced eye, but the whole impression made is that men were at last out of doors, looking and listening for themselves. Each man sees many facts not before noted, and collectively the poetry of the period presents a great body of natural phenomena of all sorts. Poets, artists, travelers, writers of fiction, unite to swell the stock of facts about the external world. Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Journals” show with what delight she and her brother dwelt upon the baldest statement of the actual facts of Nature. Gray in his “Letters,” John Scott in his “Eclogues,” show this same pleasure in simply cataloguing the lovely facts of the out-door world. Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Thomson, Dyer, Cowper, Burns, all the landscape painters from Wilson to Girtin, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe, are but leaders of the many who were striving to make report of what they found in waters and skies, in field, mountain, and plain. The wide range of these facts is astonishing. The knowledge of the poet is no longer confined to parks and gardens, to the mild and lovely aspects of Nature. His aroused curiosity pushes him out into new realms of inquiry. All kinds of Nature, animate and