ural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some
qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the
"beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always
shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why
this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in
the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen
have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and
romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the
fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a
strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial
society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to
chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself
utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips
and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of
nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur,
solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the
verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer.

Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the
transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the
romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the
earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet;
and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the
beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history
of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the
writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic
in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a
whole, was far from romantic.

Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to
notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward
sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was
only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor
of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater
variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the
publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's
'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse
which appeared were all of a new type; somber, a