Lady Winchilsea is, in the study of the poetry of Nature, the most significant of the minor poets before Thomson. She was a friend of Rowe and Pope, and was honored by complimentary verses from them.[204] She is known now chiefly because of Wordsworth’s reference to her,[205] and through the poems published in Ward’s “English Poets.”[206] Three of the poems there given, “The Nightingale,” “The Tree,” “A Nocturnal Revery,” have to do with Nature. With these exceptions the eighty-one poems in the collection of 1713[207] are thoroughly classical in their form and spirit, though unmarked by any preponderance of artificial fancies. But these three short poems are remarkable productions when thought of in connection with their author’s poetical environment. They are the earliest eighteenth-century poems in which Nature is frankly chosen as the theme, and they show a personal knowledge that must have been the accumulated result of many experiences. The observation in “The Nightingale” is especially truthful and sympathetic. That there is no attempt to describe the bird is an omission justified by the fact that the nightingale is seldom seen.[208] The two characteristics noted in the bird’s song are its exceeding sweetness and its sadness, or rather, its sense of pain.[209] A comparison of the phrases in the note will show that Lady Winchilsea listened with the hearing ear of a true poet. But we cannot fail to notice as well that the song is not fully heard or reported. In the other poets we find represented a richness, a fulness, an ecstasy, a tumult, not even hinted at in Lady Winchilsea’s poem.[210] Nor does she mention the passion most poets have heard in the song.[211] But however incomplete the impression received may have been, the poetical record of what was perceived is both truthful and vivid. She seems to write as she listens and the reader follows the variations of the song through their effect on her own mind. In the fifty-two lines of the poem on Night twenty-two natural facts are recorded. Some of these would not escape the most careless, but only close observation would discover such details as the sleepy cowslip, the grass standing upright, the unusual strength of odors, the clearer sound of falling waters, the horse’s audible cropping of the grass, the waving moon seen in the stream, and the distant call of the curlew. Lady Winchilsea’s love of Nature was of the most unambitious sort. To have seen the stately tree, to have heard the nightingale, to know all she did about night, would not have called her beyond the gates of her own park. But her joy in Nature needed no strong or novel stimulus. It is her distinction that she had fixed an “exquisite regard” on the commonest facts of the external world, and that she spoke quite clearly and simply from her own life. Hence her knowledge had the new quality of being specific and local and accurately defined.