eau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of
Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully
receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries,
that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling.

As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature
into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's
great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her
independent importance; he only assigned her a _role_ in relation to
the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand,
we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's
_Night Thoughts_:

Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne
In rayless majesty now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world...
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;
An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc.

There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy
and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling
heroes. For instance:

His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat
on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill.

Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when
it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy
breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams.

As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high;
as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of
battle.

As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each
other approached the heroes.

The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the
steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling
of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying
mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark
is the plain of death.

Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste
was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing
his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads
true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism.

In _The Influence of Natural Objects_ he described how a life spent
with Nature had early purified him from passion:

Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. I