“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very heaven!"[1]

In the age of Pope, the only type of man considered worthy a place in the best literature was the aristocrat.  The ordinary laborer was an object too contemptible even for satire.  Burns placed a halo around the head of the honest toiler.  In 1786 he could find readers for his The Cotter’s Saturday Night; and ten years later he proclaimed thoughts which would have been laughed to scorn early in the century:—­

  “Is there, for honest poverty,
    That hangs his head and a’ that? 
  The coward slave, we pass him by,
    We dare be poor for a’ that!
       * * * * *
  The rank is but the guinea stamp;
  The man’s the gowd[2] for a’ that."[3]

Wordsworth strikes almost the same chord:—­

  “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie."[4]

The tenderness and sympathy induced by this new interest in human beings resulted in the annexation to English literature of an almost unexplored continent,—­the continent of childhood.  William Blake and William Wordsworth set the child in the midst of the poetry of this romantic age.

More sympathy for animals naturally followed the increased interest in humanity.  The poems of Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge show this quickened feeling for a starved bird, a wounded hare, a hart cruelly slain, or an albatross wantonly shot.  The social disorder of the Revolution might make Wordsworth pause, but he continued with unabated vigor to teach us—­

  “Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
  With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."[5]

New humanitarian interests affected all the great poets of this age.  Although Keats was cut off while he was making an Aeolian response to the beauty of the world, yet even he, in his brief life, heard something 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.