of the new message.

Growth of Appreciation of Nature.--More appreciation of nature
followed the development of broader sympathy, Burns wrote a lyric full
of feeling for a mountain daisy which his plow had turned beneath the
furrow. Wordsworth exclaimed:--

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."[6]

For more than a century after Milton, the majority of references to
nature were made in general terms and were borrowed from the stock
illustrations of older poets, like Vergil. We find the conventional
lark, nightingale, and turtledove. Nothing new or definite is said of
them.

Increasing comforts and safety in travel now took more people where
they could see for themselves the beauty of nature. In the new poetry
we consequently find more definiteness. We can hear the whir of the
partridge, the chatter of magpies, the whistle of the quail. Poets
speak of a tree not only in general terms, but they note also the
differences in the shade of the green of the leaves and the
peculiarities of the bark. Previous to this time, poets borrowed from
Theocritus and Vergil piping shepherds reclining in the shade, whom no
Englishman had ever seen. In _Michael_ Wordsworth pictures a genuine
English shepherd.

The love for mountains and wild nature is of recent growth. One writer
in the seventeenth century considered the Alps as so much rubbish
swept together by the broom of nature to clear the plains of Italy. A
seventeenth century traveler thought the Welsh mountains better than
the Alps because the former would pasture goats. Dr. Johnson asked,
"Who can like the Highlands?" The influence of the romantic movement
developed the love for wild scenery, which is so conspicuous in
Wordsworth and Byron.

This age surpasses even the Elizabethan in endowing Nature with a
conscious soul, capable of bringing a message of solace and
companionship. The greatest romantic poet of nature thus expresses his
creed:--

"...Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy."[7]

The Victory of Romanticism.--We have traced in the preceding age the
beginnings of the romantic movement. Its ascendancy over classical
rules was complete in the period between 1780 and the Victorian age.
The romantic victory brought to literature more imagination, greater
individuality, deeper feeling, a less artificial