inanimate, wild and tame, remote and close at hand, attract interested attention. The mere mass and variety of this accumulated knowledge is sufficiently significant in its bearing on the development of a new taste for Nature, but a further general question arises as to the accuracy and delicacy of the observation. There certainly was none of the scientific spirit that would feel the charm of bare exactness, and there was hardly any of Wordsworth’s feeling that to misrepresent a fact of Nature would be sacrilege. Facts were, indeed, often noted in a loose, careless way, as if of slight importance. But taken as a whole the observation bears the mark of the eye on the object. From Lady Winchilsea to Bowles every poet who has been esteemed noteworthy in the study of Nature gives the impression that he speaks from personal knowledge, and no poetry can make that impression unless it is in its main lines true. Delicacy of observation is another matter. What the eighteenth-century poets did was to give truthful expression to very many natural facts of a kind fairly obvious to an age well versed in the lore of field and wood; but new to an age just emerged from the gates of a park. It is observation of this abundant, truthful, obvious sort that we find in Ambrose Philips, Gay, Ramsay, Shenstone, John Scott, and largely this even in Thomson. The commonest facts of Nature, the blue sky, wild flowers on a rocky ledge, rough little streams, were a wonder and a delight. Discrimination comes after general and obvious facts have been accepted and assimilated. It is inevitable, even setting aside their different temperaments, that Cowper should have more of it than Thomson. The strange thing is that in the early stages of the poetry of Nature we should find any observation so close and delicate as that in the study of night by Lady Winchilsea, of burns and mountain pools by Allan Ramsay, of winter skies and ice-burdened streams by Armstrong; or as that in Thomson’s sunset after rain, Dyer’s wide views and homely bits of country life, Collins’ evening, Gray’s skylark and song-thrush, Thomas Warton’s opening spring, Logan’s cuckoo, and Scott’s trees. The fulness and accuracy of the eighteenth-century study of Nature may be further seen by a brief analysis of the sense impressions most frequently noted.