A recognized theme, unity, proportion, are absent. Such summaries may be of the highest importance as showing the abundance and exactness of the author’s knowledge of Nature, and separate phrases may have real literary quality, but the passage as a whole is no more literary than an inventory. When, however, a purpose is apparent in the use of Nature, when there is discrimination under the dominance of a central idea, then, however crude and feeble the actual result, there is at least an attempt to use Nature in a literary way. This dominating purpose may be merely description for its own sake, an attempt to present aspects of Nature in successive, isolated, artistically composed pictures, each complete in itself and having its parts organically related. Such description is entirely objective. Its aim is the reproduction of sights and sounds by which Nature under given conditions appeals to the senses. When highly elaborated its obvious danger is that there will be, in spite of the most artistic management, a certain vagueness and heaviness of effect. There are, nevertheless, very beautiful examples of pure detailed description dissociated from any purpose except that of making a picture in words, in both Thomson and Cowper, and here and there less successful examples in other writers. A more subtle use of Nature is when the poet assembles his details in order to reproduce not a scene or an aspect of Nature, but the typical impression they have made on his mind. Lady Winchilsea tells many facts about night, but her purpose is not the description of a single night; it is the reproduction of the loving delight and tender awe awakened in her own heart by many soft summer nights. The purpose of Parnell’s descriptive details is the reproduction of the mood of spiritual content induced by certain scenes. Passages such as these are often more or less detailed summaries, but they have literary quality because the motif produces unity of effect. Again, the facts and descriptions may be adduced in support of a theory, as in Young’s “Night Thoughts,” Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” Shenstone’s “Progress of Taste,” Beattie’s “Minstrel,” and Cowper’s “Task.” Here too, an organizing purpose is discernible, though there is the greatest possible difference in the various ways of using the material for the given purpose; Young’s facts, for instance, being used in a cold, argumentative fashion, while Beattie’s and Cowper’s are suffused with emotion.