Mark how Nature’s hand bestows Abundant grace on all that grows, Tinges, with pencil slow unseen, The grass that clothes the valley green; Or spreads the tulip’s parted streaks. More distinctive, however, than this love of the spring-time world, is Hamilton’s sense of communion with Nature. The lines, As on this flowering turf I lie, My soul conversing with the sky, and this address to the passions that tyrannize over him, This grove annihilates you all. Oh power unseen, yet felt, appear! Sure something more than nature’s here, are new evidences of the spirit that animated Lady Winchilsea, Dyer, and Parnell. Hamilton’s most important poem is “The Braes of Yarrow.” In this ballad there is a remarkable blending of external Nature with the tragedy of love and death. The use of the phrase, “the Braes of Yarrow,” in the refrain adds a curiously subtle touch to the pathos of the poem. Tradition had so closely associated the sloping hills and the winding stream of Yarrow with stories of unhappy love in far-off days that the name was in itself enough to strike the keynote of pathos in Hamilton’s ballad. The tone or color that human experience had once given to the scenery was carried on by that scenery so that it became the appropriate background for a new tale of grief. The one descriptive stanza, Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, Yellow on Yarrow’s banks the gowan, Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowan; and a single line in the maiden’s lament, I sang, my voice the woods returning, are an appropriate setting for the happy love of the bonny bride and her comely swain. But Nature is also compelled, as it were, to share in the grief, and is implicated in the crime. On Yarrow’s rueful flood floats the body of the slain knight; her doleful hills echo the cries of sorrow. And the desolate bride prays that rain and dew may forever forsake the fields where her lover was so basely slain. The descriptive element in Hamilton’s ballad is of further interest as having suggested some of the details in Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Unvisited.” “The Deity,” a poem by Samuel Boyse, and much praised in its own day,[362] is of importance here merely because of its Thomsonian imitations, and because of its conception of God in Nature. This conception is, in the main, the typical classical one, as in “Omnipotence,” where the central idea is, What hand, Almighty Architect, but thine Could give the model of this vast design? In “Providence,” however, the modified classical conception is apparent, the ever-working power of God being dwelt upon. All Nature is represented as being each moment derived from the Creator. The sun from thy superior radiance bright Eternal sheds his delegated light; Thou shedd’st the tepid morning’s balmy dews, are characteristic lines.