James Thomson (1700–1748) is confessedly the most important figure in the early history of Romanticism. He foreshadowed the new spirit in various ways, as in his strong love of liberty, his constant plea for the poor as against the rich, his preference for blank verse, his imitation of older models, especially Spenser, and in his tendency toward comprehensive schemes; but his chief importance is in his attitude toward external Nature. If, however, we take into consideration all his work, we shall find in more than three-fourths of it the utmost apparent indifference to Nature. In the five tragedies written between 1738 and 1748 there is no hint that their author knew more of the world about him than the veriest classicist of them all. In “Alfred” (1740), written by Thomson and Mallet, there are occasional descriptive touches, but these are almost too slight to mention when we think what effects might have been produced in a play the action of which occurs on a beautiful wooded island inhabited only by a few peasants. In the other tragedies Nature is drawn upon merely for conventional similitudes, as in “Edward and Elenora” (1739), where five of the eleven similitudes are the comparison of rage or fierce passions to tempests; or in “Sophonisba,” an earlier play (1728), where there is not a fresher or more forceful comparison than that of an army to a torrent, passion to a whirlwind, the hero to a lion, and the heroine to a blooming morn. In the 3,300 lines of the tedious poem, “Liberty” (1734–36), not more than fifty refer to external Nature, and of these the only passages that suggest, even remotely, the author of “The Seasons” are the descriptions of the sullen land of Sarmatia[270] and the shaggy mountain charms of the Swiss Alps.[271] “The Castle of Indolence,” written in 1733, is the only one of the poems written after 1730 that indicates any genuine love of Nature. The charm of this poem for modern readers is perhaps largely due to its use of external Nature, for, though there is little of the rich, elaborate description characteristic of “The Seasons,” what there is, is so exquisitely appropriate that all the listless, luxurious life of this land of soft delights is seen through a romantic and picturesque setting of waving, shadowy woods, sunny glades, and silver streams. Yet a closer study of the descriptive stanzas shows little more than a musically felicitous combination of the attributes conventionally recognized as belonging to a pleasing landscape. The only lines really indicative of a love of Nature such as the classicists had not known are the following from the second canto: I care not, Fortune, what you me deny: You can not rob me of free Nature’s grace; You can not shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You can not bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.[272]