Nature is thus throughout the poem made strictly subservient to the human theme, but the intrinsic beauty of the brief descriptions, quite apart from the context, cannot pass unnoticed. Separate lines have the power of suggesting whole pictures. For example in How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke, the ringing blow of the ax, the crash of the falling tree, smite upon the ear. The stanza beginning Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield suggests several themes for the landscape artist. There is also a wide, peaceful landscape effect in The lowing herds wind slowly o’er the lea. And the line The swallow twittering from its straw-built shed brings up all the details of a humble farmyard. These and other descriptions in the “Elegy” are distinctively English in spirit and detail. They are the result of first-hand knowledge, they are drawn with a firm hand, and they are used with an instinctive recognition of artistic fitness. A new range of sympathies, however, appears in the poems of Gray’s third or purely romantic period. Here he writes of northern mythologies and superstitions or gives transcripts of Norse tales, and the pictures interwoven with the human elements are of a wild and savage character. In “The Bard,” mountain, precipice, and torrent form a setting without which the fiery denunciation of the poet would lose half its force. The storm and the whirlwind sweep through these poems. Rough and frowning steeps, foaming floods, warring winds, the heights of Snowdon and huge Plinlimmon, darkness, cold, make up the terrible but dramatically appropriate environment for the fierce, imprecatory elegy which the bard utters over his lost companions, for the fatal and dreadful song of the gigantic sisters weaving “the loom of Hell.” In one or two other poems there is effective use of Nature. The joy of a convalescent able at last to go out of doors was not an uncommon subject through this period, but there is no better expression of it than in “A Fragment” by Gray. The feeling, and in passages, the phraseology, are almost Wordsworthian. The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise, is an illustrative stanza. There are also some exquisite lines on birds, as, But chief, the Sky-lark warbles high His trembling thrilling ecstacy; And, lessening from the dazzled sight, Melts into air and liquid light,[391] and, There pipes the wood-lark, and the song-thrush there Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air.[392] Though undated these lines in their spirit and workmanship ally themselves at once with the period of the “Elegy” rather than with the later work. They also accurately represent Gray’s dominant attitude toward Nature, his knowledge of sweet, homely things, and the delicate perfection of his literary touch.