In “The Seasons” as in preceding poetry both man and Nature have a place, but there is a great transfer of emphasis. Nature had been ignored or counted as the servant, the background, the accompaniment of man. Now the human incidents are few and unimportant and are used chiefly to lay additional stress by their tone on the spirit characteristic of each season. Nature is loved and studied and described purely for her own sake. There is very little use of natural facts as similes for human qualities, and there is, practically, no use of pathetic fallacy. The effect of Nature on the man sensitive to her high ministration is represented as twofold. In the first place and chiefly, she storms his senses with her ravishing delights. She gives him pleasures of the most rich and varied sort. She enchants him with color and harmony and perfume. These pleasures are, however, of the eye and ear. They do not touch the deeper joys of the heart. Of the appeal of Nature to the soul of man, in the true Wordsworthian sense, Thomson knew little. Yet occasional passages indicate that he had received from Nature gifts higher than that of mere external, sensuous enjoyment. He attributes to Nature in at least a partially Wordsworthian sense, the power of soothing, elevating, and instructing. He sings the “infusive force” of spring on man, When heaven and earth as if contending vie To raise his being, and serene his soul.[322] It is his delight to “meditate the book of Nature” for thence he hopes to “learn the moral song.”[323] At the soft evening hour, he lonely loves To seek the distant hills, and there converse With nature, there to harmonize his heart.[324] Not only does he attend to Nature’s voice from month to month, and watch with admiration her every shape, but he Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart.[325] While these and a few other similar passages would hardly be remarked in the poetry of Nature after Wordsworth, they are of great historical importance because they show the early beginning of that spirit which received its final and perfect expression seventy years later in “The Lyrical Ballads.”