Through all this detailed study and wide knowledge of Nature there runs an undercurrent of personal enthusiasm which is quite a separate thing from the knowledge of Nature, but which led to that knowledge and was fed by it. Sometimes we are left to infer this enthusiasm from results, but oftener it finds clear statement. There is frequent expression of such “unspeakable joy” as Ambrose Philips felt when he gazed on a little country home, or of Ramsay’s “heartsome joy” on a bright spring morning to see the rising plants, And hear the birds chirm o’er their pleasin’ rants, or of Hamilton’s rapturous joy as he lies on the flowering turf, his soul “commercing with the sky.” In many passages Thomson expresses his passionate delight in the music, the color, the fragrances of the out-door world. Dyer’s joys run high as he lies on the mountain-turf. Shenstone says that the beauties of Nature alone bear perpetual sway, and he thinks with scorn of a soul so narrow that it cannot relish Nature’s calm delights. Joseph Warton cannot find words to express the ecstasy with which he looks on Nature. John Langhorne’s only wish is that he may enjoy the blessings Nature gives to those who love her, and says that her charm alone is unfading. Beattie says that the man who goes to Nature has rapture ever new. Cowper thinks that any man who turns away from Nature starves deservedly. Burns says that he looked upon Nature with boundless joy. This feeling of exhilaration, of rapturous delight, is pervasive. It is often inadequate, or vague, or extravagant in statement, but the delight is unfeigned, the enthusiasm real, and in poet after poet it demanded expression. That it seldom found the perfect statement only means that art is long and that much thinking and feeling in an age as in an individual must go before the final art-form.