they were
written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's
_Pleasures of Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death,
was written like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its
language had much of the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets,
it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the
soft beauties of a highly cultivated land--lawns, gardens,
forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was
struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and
France--romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild.
Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and
the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France,
Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his
instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer
published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the
_Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in England were the
odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747-57,
especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands_, and
Gray's _Bard_, a pindaric, in which the last survivor of the Welsh
bards invokes vengeance on {195} Edward I., the destroyer of his guild.
Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the
ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, 1765, aroused a taste for old ballads. Richard Hurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_, 1774-78, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace
Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated
this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and
contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.
James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of
Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the
most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the
romantic past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's
literary forgeries.

In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what
professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard,
whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made
his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_, from
Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the