Nature may, finally, be regarded not only as making a sensuous appeal to man, or as entering in some way into relationship with him, but as having an independent and separate existence. The poet who thus conceives of Nature gives little detailed external description; nor does he think of a scene in its human connotations, but he goes through facts and perceives the spirit of the scene, the essential qualities that make it what it is. Of such use of Nature we find few eighteenth-century examples. It demands not only Wordsworth’s wise passiveness of mood, and clarity of vision, and depth of feeling, but likewise the power to speak the inevitable word. The detailed study of a barren field in its most barren aspect would be inexcusably dull and dreary from any but the historical point of view. The moment that point of view is adopted interest begins. The study of literature as a growth, and evolution, gives a new significance to periods of transition. The pleasure of the biologist in the lower forms of life is paralleled by the delight of the student of literature in tracing out the first vague, ineffective attempts to express ideas that are afterward regnant. The final effect of the present study is one of surprise to find how completely the ideas of the early nineteenth-century poetry of Nature were represented in the germ in the eighteenth century. The whole impression is that before the work of such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott there was a great stir of getting ready. The love of Nature was awake in the hearts of men. Their eyes were open to her beauty. Their ears drank in her harmonies. Their spirits were conscious of her higher gifts. Before Wordsworth most of his characteristic thoughts on Nature had received fairly explicit statement. We note also the vitality of the impulse toward Nature as indicated by the many directions in which it pushed out and demanded expression. With little self-conscious direction and independently of each other apparently, the various arts were irresistibly impelled to some sort of expression of the new interest in the external world. Nor can we ignore the fact that behind all forms of art expression there must have been the great impulsive force of a love of Nature active in the hearts of the mute inglorious many. When at the end of such a period of preparation the great poet comes, he is great by virtue of his power to penetrate beneath literary conventions and to give free, vigorous, adequate expression to the struggling, half-articulate thoughts and feelings of his own age. He is not an inexplicable, isolated phenomenon. He has his natural place in the development. The profound significance of the work that marks an epoch in thought is that it not only directs the future, but it sums up the past. INDICES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX COLLECTIONS