It was not till Thomson began to publish The Seasons in 1726 that the development was complete in poetry.  Thomson is a difficult poet to appreciate rightly, for though his subject was ‘nature’ his method was often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere.  What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins.  We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented.  That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms.  The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany.  I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset’s Nuits; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German ‘Romanticists’, and in Heine.  It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.

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And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children.  In this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature.  And this was of no one country or nationality.  The first and also the greatest artist of the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its highest expression in Faust.  The passion for freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words—­this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this.  The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be satisfied, will never say to the moment, ’Verweile doch, du bist zu schoen.’  For the drama of Faust is not a drama of damnation, but of redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the tragedy.