It is obvious that two great changes or advances were necessary, if poetry was to be freed from the bondage of this conventional diction. In the first place, the poet must reject root and branch the traditional stock of words and phrases that may once have been inspiring, but had become lifeless and mechanical long before they fell into disuse; he must write with his eye on the object, and translate his impressions into fresh terms endowed with real, imaginative power. And this first condition would naturally lead to a second, requiring every word and phrase to be a spontaneous reflection of genuine feeling felt in the presence of Nature and her vast powers.
The neo-classical poetry proper was not without verse which partly satisfied these conditions; direct contact with nature was never entirely lost. Wordsworth, as we know, gave honourable mention[254] to “The Nocturnal Reverie” of Anne, Countess Winchilsea, written at the very height of the neo-classical supremacy, in which external nature is described with simplicity and fidelity, though there is little trace of any emotion roused in the writer’s mind by the sights and sounds of outdoor life. And every now and then, amid the arid and monotonous stretches of so much eighteenth century verse, we are startled into lively interest by stumbling across, often in the most obscure and unexpected corners, a phrase or a verse to remind us that Nature, and all that the term implies, was still making its powerful appeal to the hearts and minds of men, that its beauty and mystery was still being expressed in simple and heartfelt language. Thomas Dyer’s “Grongar Hill” has already been mentioned; it was written in 1726, the year of the publication of Thompson’s “Winter.” Dyer, for all we know, may have the priority, but in any case we see him here leading back poetry to the sights and sounds and scents of external nature, which he describes, not merely as a painter with a good eye for landscape, but as a lover who feels the thrill and call of the countryside, and can give exquisite expression to his thoughts and emotions. We have only to recall such passages as
Who, the purple evening lie,
On the mountain’s lonely van;
or even his tree catalogue,
The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir, that taper grows,
The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs;
or