Nature gives not only peace and rest to man; she gives him joy. The sense of ecstasy and rapture in this joy has already been indicated in the passages expressive of personal enthusiasm for Nature. Sometimes it was a joy rising out of the delight of agreeable physical sensations, as when Lady Winchilsea felt in the odor of the jonquil a pleasure so keen that it was pain, or when Langhorne sank down oppressed by the boundless charms of field and wood, or such joy as Gray’s convalescent knew when he went out again into Nature. But here a more spiritual joy is referred to. It is rather the disturbing joy of elevated thoughts of which Wordsworth speaks. This uplift of soul in the presence of Nature is felt by Parnell when he seeks to give expression to the great chorus of thanksgiving to God from all existences. Lady Winchilsea and John Langhorne felt it when Nature gave them “thoughts too high to be express’t.” Akenside felt it, and in a truly Wordsworthian sense, when he said that in the presence of Nature the intellect is charmed into a suspension of its graver cares, while love and joy alone possess the soul. Burns finds that Nature exalts, enraptures him, making him conscious of an elevation of soul. And, finally, in Gilpin, we find, though awkwardly expressed, an exact statement of the enthusiastic calm, the visionary joy, with which Wordsworth looked on Nature. A third gift of Nature is poetical inspiration, and that, too, in the sense in which Wordsworth believed that Nature set him apart for poetry and assisted him in his development. Akenside’s apostrophe to the Wansbeck along whose banks he wandered in childhood, “led in silence by some powerful hand unseen,” his assertion that these influences fixed the color of his life for every future year, his thought of Nature’s “tender discipline” when skies and streams and groves conspire to guide the predestined sons of Fancy, are strikingly Wordsworthian. Langhorne says that in his lonely youth “the woodland genius” came and touched him with the holy flame of poetry. To the “Genius of Westmoreland” he ascribes the sacred fire within his breast. The whole theme of Beattie’s “Minstrel” is, as has been pointed out, the effect of Nature on a poetically sensitive mind. Nature also gives a wisdom such as books and schools cannot give. The earliest expression of this thought is in Pattison’s comparison of the deep wisdom drawn from Nature and the superficial knowledge of the schools. Gay in the contest between the shepherd who knew Nature and the philosopher who knew cities and books determined that Nature without the schools can make men wise. Langhorne says that “fair Philosophy,” like Poetry, must be sought for in Nature. There is, however, no other eighteenth-century statement of this idea so complete as Cowper’s eulogy of the wisdom of the heart that Nature gives.