Goodness that is ever-flowing through earth, air, and sea, and on the ceaseless song of praise going up from the great community of Nature’s sons. Boyse in his “Deity” thinks of God as an Almighty Architect, but has a few lines in which he represents all Nature as being momently derived from God. Young has a significant line when he says that night is the “felt presence of the Deity.” The theme of Akenside’s poem is to show the response which the imaginative mind finds in Nature, and this response is, he says, the voice of the divine spirit. His conception is usually, to be sure, that the divine spirit speaks through the forms of Nature, rather than that the form and the spirit have an essential union. Yet sometimes he speaks more clearly the new thought. He says that the man who loves Nature holds daily converse with God himself; the beauty of Nature flows directly from God; the order in Nature is sacred; the influence whereby Nature soothes and cheers and elevates man is really a divine influence. This is the fullest recognition of an in-dwelling God until we reach Cowper. In his poetry we find a clear statement of belief in the lines, There lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God, but the point is not one on which he dwells. These passages certainly foreshadow Wordsworth’s conception of God in Nature, but they are comparatively feeble and unimaginative in expression. There is nothing so Wordsworthian in Thomson’s sonorous lines or in Akenside’s ample statement as there is the feeling that penetrates the brief words of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell. Compared to these even Cowper seems cold and intellectual. Wordsworth did not, however, lay special stress on his belief that the spirit he felt in Nature was divine. He rather took that for granted, or allowed it to be implied in the passionate fulness and intensity of his expressions of gratitude to that spirit for gifts of mind and heart. This sense of indebtedness to Nature found no place in the classical poetry. But in the transition period it receives surprisingly full and varied expression. Sometimes it takes the form of personal gratitude for special gifts; sometimes it is a general statement of what man owes to Nature. A brief review of the more significant passages will serve to show the characteristics of this feeling toward Nature.