Wordsworth and Shelley, who, in their attitude toward Nature, are respectively moralist and metaphysician. Byron’s distinction is that he alone found “le juste équilibre entre l’exubérance de la nature et celle du pur esprit.” Thomson’s “Seasons” are of value because of good _genre_ pictures and vivid descriptions of English sports, but the initial force in the return to Nature is Burns. Unquestionably the most important of the books that treat of Nature in the realm of art is Biese’s “Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit” (1888).[2] The book is written with enthusiasm and is stimulating and suggestive. The subject-matter is well in hand, and so thoroughly organized that the great movements in the historical development of the love of Nature are easily grasped. The plan is comprehensive, including not only poetry, but, in briefer outline, landscape painting and gardening, and, incidentally, even fiction and philosophy. The least satisfactory portion of the book is the treatment of the love of Nature in English life and thought. There is some stress on the development of the English garden, but English landscape painting is not mentioned. In the casual mention of English fiction the emphasis is on Defoe. In poetry two epochs are recognized, that of Shakspere and that of Byron. The chapter on Shakspere is a close and valuable study. The work of Byron is estimated with justness and sympathy, as is also that of Shelley. But the study of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature is singularly inadequate. His genius is considered as essentially of the pastoral-idyllic order, with now and then glimpses of an “echte Liebe für die Natur,” and an unmistakable pantheism. He is chiefly important as having done for England what Scott did for Scotland and Moore for Ireland, and as sounding certain notes which rang again in Byron “in verstärkter Tonart.” Thomson is the only eighteenth-century poet studied. Here again is a failure to recognize the real importance of the poet’s work. Biese acknowledges the truth of Thomson’s separate pictures of Nature, and his genuine love of the country, but denies his importance as a “pathfinder,” saying that he but followed where Pope’s “Pastorals” and “Windsor Forest” had marked out the way.