The use of Nature in connection with man’s joys or sorrows may be lyrical or it may be dramatic in tone. Under the lyrical use of Nature may be classed the numerous passages in which the poet dwells upon his youth and the early joy he had in forest, stream, and field. The homesick longing, the genuine human feeling, and the marks of local fidelity to fact make this use of Nature usually excellent. It often takes the form of an apostrophe to some specific river or grove or hill. This autobiographic use of Nature is well exemplified in Thomson, Akenside, Beattie, Langhorne, Mickle, Bruce, and Cowper. Again, the poet recounts with lyrical fervor his debt to Nature. He gives thanks for content, joy, peace, serenity, or he implores Nature to appease the longings of his sick heart, to restore his soul to health. In either case there is a mingling of human emotions and details from Nature. Such passages may easily be feebly hysterical, but sometimes as in Dyer, Beattie, Akenside, Langhorne, and Cowper, they are marked by genuine beauty and pathos as well as by directness of vision. Perhaps the best examples of scenes thus indissolubly connected with phases of spiritual experience are Bowles’ sonnets, and unquestionably the highest purely lyrical use of Nature is in Burns’ songs. Nature is used dramatically when it is made the appropriate background or accompaniment of human life. This use of Nature may be merely to intensify the reader’s impression by certain effects of harmony or contrast. Night, for instance, is considered the appropriate setting for reflections on man’s mortality, as in Young and Parnell. A certain sort of scenery becomes the conventionally fit background for romantic aspirations and dejections, as in all the sentimental melancholy poets. But oftener Nature is not merely a background. It is mingled with the thought and action. This is true of most of the reflective, moralizing poetry, and is true in a more dramatic sense in such pastorals as Ramsay’s and Gay’s where it is impossible to think of the people and their doings apart from the Nature about them. A similar dramatic use of Nature is to be seen in Gray, in Collins, in Ossian, and, in a briefer form, in the Ballads. It is, however, in romantic fiction that this use of Nature is most abundant during the eighteenth century. As background, as accompaniment, and further, even as a force contributing to the progress of the story by its determining influence on mood and character, external Nature plays an important part. This background, indeed, sometimes becomes unduly important, almost usurping the place of the picture, as in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances.