NATURE- POETRY. 
NE of the most noteworthy movements of the present 
age has been what may be termed, in general, the 
Return to Nature. The pleasures of nature have, no 
doubt, exerted attractions over mankind in general in 
all ages, and this has led them to preserve or revi\-e traditions 
of a golden age, which they endowed with all sorts of un- 
attainable felicities. But it was regarded mainly as a poet’s 
fancy, to be cherished only by ordinary people as a pious opinion 
of better days long gone by. Wild nature lay for awhile under 
the ban of mediaeval superstition, which looked upon it as the 
stronghold of the Evil One, to be shunned by all who did not 
desire too close communion with such a being. 
As a modern movement, the return to nature owes its origin 
largely to Rousseau. He it was who first, among eighteenth 
century philosophers, transformed into a deliberate conviction 
what had before been little more than a pious opinion ; and he 
elevated it therefrom into a religious creed. In an age when 
culture and intelligence were assumed to be inseparable from the 
city, he kept insisting on the superiority of the life of the country; 
when wildness was held to be the same as deformity, he gave 
thrilling descriptions of mountains, forests, waterfalls, and the 
other great forces of nature ; and by rapturous praise of simplicity 
in education, in dress, in diet, in manners, and in the whole 
system of living, when society was steeped in every sort of 
artificiality and self-indulgence, he marked the beginning of a new 
spirit, of a reverential sympathy with nature, a passionate appeal 
from the conventional to the innate, which was one of the most 
characteristic features of the revolutionary era, and was destined 
to produce momentous consequences upon both politics and 
literature. 
To the influence of Rousseau, in the direction of greater 
naturalness and simplicity, much was owed by Wordsworth, and 
much too by Shelley ; while the poet-naturalists of a later period, 
such as Thoreau and Jefferies, may be considered as his lineal 
descendants in their treatment of problems relating to the com- 
parative merits of nature and civilisation. 
It is with those who have been well called poet-naturalists 
that the poetry referred to has mainly arisen. With them the 
literary treatment of natural history has been expanded and 
exalted no less than the poetical conception of nature itself; and 
the result has been that the idealistic tendency of modern poetry, 
taking form with an intense sympathy with woods and fields and 
streams, has affected and permeated such studies even as zoology 
and botany. In true prose-poetry, if not always in verse itself, 
these poet-naturalists have shown us that the ideal of nature is to 
be beautiful and calm ; they call attention to the joy in life of all 
animals and birds, to the lissom bound of the hare, the musical 
