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 rôle 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.