COPYRIGHT 1909 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Composed and Printed By PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The eighteenth century is a period of transition and as such its literature holds two elements, a vital impulse past its prime but still dominant, and a new conception gradually emerging into dominance. It is the interweaving of these elements, the slow fading of the old, the slow gain of the new in fulness, definiteness, and ardor of statement, that make this period peculiarly interesting for detailed study. The interest persists even when the transition to be studied is limited to so narrow a section of human experience as the attitude toward Nature. The investigation, the results of which are embodied in this book, was primarily undertaken to determine the place of Nature in the poetry before Wordsworth. Every genius is, to be sure, more or less of a miracle, and certainly not to be accounted for by any conditions of literary heredity or even environment. But he cannot, on the other hand, be justly thought of as an isolated phenomenon. Though not the direct heir of any particular predecessors, he is, nevertheless, in a vital and inescapable way, the heir of the general tone and temper of his own and preceding times. In that fact lies the justification of a study along historical lines of any recognized tendency in thought. The pleasure of the biologist in the lower forms of life is paralleled by the delight of the student of literature in tracing out the first vague, ineffective attempts to express ideas that are afterward regnant. In the present study the final effect is one of surprise to discover not only how early the new thought of Nature finds expression, but how completely the ideas of the period of Wordsworth were represented in the germ in the eighteenth century. The whole impression is that before the work of such men as Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, there was a great stir of getting ready. It may fairly be said that before Wordsworth most V OCT 14 '57 1606901 |