THE Poetry of Nature which I have already defined, and which is a distinct thing in our poetry after 1790, did not come into being without previous warning, and the object of this lecture is to sketch its growth from the time of Pope to the time of Wordsworth. In the previous lecture I sketched the growth of the poetry of Man, and of the doctrinal and theological elements in our poetry, and sketched them separately for the sake of greater clearness; but in this lecture I shall throw the theological and poetical subjects together, and while I trace the growth of the poetry of Nature, trace along with it, step by step, the theology that accompanied it, or the elements in it. which resisted the presence of a theology.

The poetry which speaks directly of Nature for its own sake is not to be found in England till the time of Cowper when it distinctly began, is not developed till Wordsworth when it rapidly reached its full growth. Chaucer's landscape is for the most part conventional, though what there is of it is touched with the dewy brightness and affection of the Poet. But he saw but little, and nothing solely for its own sake. The Elizabethan Poets introduce bits of landscape, but these are chiefly as

a background for the setting off of their own feelings or for the display of their characters; and though the natural poetry of Shakespeare has his quality of perfectness, it has little personal love of Nature. It is not till we get to Milton, to the "Allegro" and "Penseroso," that we find any pure natural description, any deliberate choice of natural beauty as a thing to be studied for its own sake. When we arrive at the Critical School, Nature is wholly put out of the field. It is looked at, when it is at all touched, from the windows of the suburbs; the country is despised and life in it considered inconceivably dull. Pope condoles with those who are driven from the city, who dream in the rural shade of triumphs in the town and wake to find the vision fled, left in "lone woods or empty walls." The descriptions in his pastorals have no resemblance to Nature, and when he steps aside to praise natural beauty, it is when it has been subjected to the critical hand of Art. It was characteristic of the time that Nature had to undergo the same sort of polish as verse. Wild Nature was as bad as wild poetry, and the art of the landscape gardener must be employed to check her extravagance and lessen her horrors. We will try Pope, however, when he describes a piece of pure landscape that he had seen,-Windsor Forest, in the pastorals:

There, interspers'd in lawns and op'ning glades
Thin trees arise that shun each other's shades.
Here in full light the russet plains extend :
There wrapt in clouds the bluish hills ascend.
Ev'n the wild heath displays her purple dyes,

And midst the desert fruitful hills arise,

That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn,
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.

That is concoction, not composition; it is full of stock phrases, and it is plain that Pope made it up in his study with no recollected pleasure of the scene, with even a recollected distress at the distance he was then from town, which expresses itself in such absurd terms as the desert and the sable waste. Indeed, one can scarcely imagine the physical discomfort, the confusion of mind, the boredom which Pope, and Belinda and her court would have suffered if they had been placed side by side with Wordsworth,―

when from the naked top

Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise
up and bathe the world in light!

or asked, with Byron

Where mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been,
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never seek a fold.

Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean.

But if we can imagine it for a moment, we have some idea of the change in the temper of society with regard to Nature, some cause for wonder at the new world into which, since the days when Pope wrote, we have been brought by the Poets.

The Nature then of which Pope thought was a wholly different thing from that which we conceive; and the theology which he connected with it was just as different. The Nature of which Wordsworth conceived, the living things of earth, and air, and water, that spoke to him like friends and moved by their "own sweet will," was separate from Man, and God spoke through it to Man. In Pope's idea it was mingled up as a part of the system of the universe

with Man, and both had the same kind of life from the immanent presence of God. In fact, the Nature of which Pope spoke was nothing more than that order of the universe which the recent scientific activity had begun to impress on cultivated men; and in that order, and not in the disorder of revealed Religions with their supernatural interferences, God, the Great Unknown, so far as Man could presume to scan Him, was most clearly to be seen. Here is his view in well-known lines, which seem but are not Pantheistic, for Pope, as in the line, "The workman from his work distinct was known," takes care always to separate the first cause from the things caused.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part;
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect in vile man that mourns
As the rapt seraph, that adores and burns :
To him no high, no low, no great, no small—
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.

That is not the Nature we love or we know; we give a wholly different meaning to the term; and we approach Nature in a different way. Pope, looking on it as a great system, considered it from his study with all the means of the observing and inquiring intellect, and never thought of its beauty as a source of pleasure. We look on it as the storehouse of some of our deepest pleasures;

we consider it with a love which may be called passionate, and we study it by all the means with which emotion furnishes us. Owing to this-and especially to its being seen as separate from us-we are forced, when we come to think of God in connection with it, to have a theology of Nature wholly distinct from this of Pope's, and we shall see how in Wordsworth the whole of the Natural Theology of the eighteenth century disappears. It is this change we shall trace to-day.

It was during the life-time of Pope that the change began; it was when the English heart had been almost exiled from the woods and hills, that the door into the Paradise in which we have wandered with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, and a hundred other lovers of the wild world of earth and air and sea, was opened for our entrance. In 1726, nearly twenty years before the death of Pope, James Thomson published his "Winter," and in 1730, the whole of the "Seasons" was given to the world. The greater part of it must have been, so far as its feeling went, incomprehensible to Pope. That "recollected love," which Thomson said he embodied in his descriptions of Nature, could never have been felt by a single one of the followers of the Critical School.

It is true that the taint of the artificial spirit lingered in his poetry, but for all that it was a new world to the English people. The woods, the rivers, the moors, the cornfields, the mountain floods, the summer skies, the tempests, all the broad aspects of Nature were seen and detailed with some real care and affection. One sees that he is often painting directly from the scene; that sometimes his monotonous, and turgid style is forgotten that