were born of “spring’s green hours,” and the murmuring shore spoke to him “divine words,”[407] while in earlier days “each lay that falter’d from his tongue” had been “from Eden’s murmurs caught.”[408] In an ode to the “Genius of Westmoreland,” he says that she kindled the “sacred fire” in his heart, that she gave him “thoughts too high to be exprest.” Again he speaks of an hour in his youth when The woodland genius came And touched me with his holy flame.[409] Statements still more remarkable as foreshadowing later doctrines are found in such lines as, Whatever charms the ear or eye, All beauty and all harmony, If sweet sensations they produce, I know they have their moral use. I know that nature’s charms can move The springs that strike to virtue’s love.[410] Or these lines, Has fair philosophy thy love? Away! she lives in yonder grove. If the sweet muse thy pleasure gives, With her, in yonder grove, she lives. And if religion claims thy care, Religion fled from books is there. For first from nature’s works we drew Our knowledge and our virtue too.[411] Langhorne’s perception of the power of Nature over man, and his passionate sense of personal indebtedness to Nature are the keynotes of his work. In a narrow way and with feeble speech he shows a mental and spiritual experience of the same type as that which Wordsworth records of his own youth. His motive in writing, “an unaffected wish to promote the love of Nature and the interests of humanity,” is likewise Wordsworthian. In Christopher Smart’s one great poem, the “Song to David” (1763), the use of Nature is of so strange a character that it refuses classification under the customary categories. The chief thought of the poem in the parts where Nature is used has to do with the creative energy of God, the song of praise that is eternally his from all existence, and the exceeding sweetness, strength, beauty, and glory of the Spirit of God in man. These themes are not new with Smart in this poem. In his prize poems ten years before he had taken the attributes of God as his subject, and the general line of thought, and the method of proof by the rapid accumulation of illustrative images drawn from Nature are practically the same as in the “Song to David.” Here and there are instances of the same noble conceptions and striking phrases, as in this picture of a tree: The oak His lordly head uprears, and branching arms Extends--behold in regal solitude And pastoral magnificence he stands So simple! and so great! The underwood Of meaner rank an awful distance keep.[412] Or this description of the Leviathan that, The terror and the glory of the main, His pastime takes with transport proud to see, The ocean’s vast dominions all his own.[413]