Still more noteworthy is Lady Winchilsea’s spiritual sensitiveness to Nature. Such a phrase as “the mysterious face of heaven” marks a new conception of the sky. Night is no longer “the parent of fears” but a time whose solemn quiet suggests a strange and subtle sense of something too high for syllables to speak. Nature is to her no mere background for human life. Man is influenced by Nature. His rage is disarmed. His spirit is led to feel a sedate content. And sometimes in moments of especial insight there is revealed to him in the inferior world an existence “like his own.” Not often before Wordsworth is there so distinct a prevision of his way of looking at Nature.[212] In the slow turning of English poetry from the artificial to the natural John Gay was distinctly helpful, yet the reader of “Trivia,” “The Fan,” “The Epistles,” the “Fables,” and even the “Eclogues” would hardly suspect their author of knowing, in any close way, any life outside the city. It is only in “Rural Sports,” written when he was twenty-eight, and “The Shepherd’s Week,” when he was twenty-nine, that we find any real study of Nature. In “Rural Sports” hunting and especially fishing are described with the enthusiasm and technical accuracy of an expert. There is no hint of the feeling toward animals that made Thomson and Cowper abhor hunting. There is simply a thoroughly sportsmanlike knowledge of details, a sense of pleasurable excitement in the chase, and joy in victory. This delight in open-air pursuits is often far enough removed from any real love of Nature, and is here of much less significance than casual passages showing Gay’s love of the world about him. He tells us that it was his habit to take morning walks through the fields,[213] that at sunset he often strayed out to the cliffs near Barnstaple, and lingered to watch the glowing colors of the sunset, and the later beauty of an “unclouded sky” bright with stars and a silver moon that marked a glittering path along the sea.[214] Gay’s love of Nature was largely confined to the milder aspects, but he seems not to have been entirely indifferent to hills. In speaking of Cotton Hill in North Devonshire he said, When its summit I climb, I then seem to be Just as if I approached nearer heaven! When with spirits depress’d to this hill I repair, My spirits then instantly rally; It was near this bless’d spot, I first drew vital air, So--a hill I prefer to a valley.[215]