Bright darkness without birth or bound,
Swallowed the very world--burying thought.
My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought;
I lost myself,
So suddenly it beat me down,
And threatened with despair.
But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss,
All present God! in Thee--I found myself again.
While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, Shaftesbury[[8]] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth century.[[9]] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of Lenotre, England passed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild in its own way, and Pope wrote:
To build, to plant, whatever you intend,