With the spaciousness of the Georgics as precedent, James Thomson writes his poem on the seasons, mingling scenes from nature and rural life with philosophic reflections on nature and the God of nature. In these reflections the influence of Shaftesbury is dominant, but it is joined by that of Newton. Indeed, as McKillop has shown, all the major currents of religio-philosophic thought as applied to nature meet in The Seasons; and the reflections are supported by a more immediate response to the variety, grandeur, and beauty of nature than is found in the rather labored paragraphs of Shaftesbury. Though the subject is well worth pursuing in detail, we can afford here no more than a quotation from A Hymn, in which various currents of thought mingle and merge: a Shaftesburian sense of God's immanence, a Newtonian sense of his direction and control, the older traditions of God's power and goodness as revealed in the work of his hand, and of all his creatures as owing and paying him praise, and a sense of progression as the mark of nature's life, culminating in an apocalyptic note.

These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy Beauty walks, thy Tenderness and Love….

Then comes thy Glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year,
And oft thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks….

Thy Bounty shines in Autumn unconfin'd,
And spreads a common feast for all that lives.
In Winter, awful thou! with clouds and storms
Around thee thrown, tempest o'er tempest roll'd.
Majestic darkness! On the whirlwind's wing
Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore….
Mysterious round! what skill, what force divine,
Deep-felt in these appear!…
But wandering oft with brute unconscious gaze,
Man marks not thee, marks not the mighty hand
That, ever busy, wheels the silent spheres,
Works in the secret deep, shoots streaming thence
The fair profusion that o'erspreads the Spring,
Flings from the sun direct the flaming day,
Feeds every creature, hurls the tempest forth,
And, as on earth this grateful change revolves,
With transport touches all the springs of life.

Nature attend! join, every living soul
Beneath the spacious temple of the sky,
In adoration join, and ardent raise
One general song….
Still sing the God of Seasons as they roll….
Since God is ever present, ever felt
In the void waste as in the city full,
And where he vital spreads there must be joy.
When even at last the solemn hour shall come,
And wing my mystic flight to future worlds,
I cheerful will obey….
I cannot go
Where universal love smiles not around,
Sustaining all yon orbs and all their sons
From seeming evil still educing good,
And better thence again, and better still,
In infinite progression. But I lose
Myself in him, in light ineffable!
Come then, expressive Silence, muse his praise.

Here natural religion has taken the place of revealed; nature is itself a sufficient revelation; and with revealed religion has disappeared that realistic—sometimes even excessive—sense of evil, which finds expression in the Christian dogma of man's Fall, accompanied by nature's dislocation, and of the imperative need of redemption by Christ. Fallen man can find in fallen nature, so runs the orthodox reply, only a snare and pitfall; what Shaftes-bury, Thomson, and their fellows attribute to man in general can be truly experienced only by the redeemed: for the regenerate—and for them alone—nature itself is transfigured. This is the burden of William Cowper's criticism of such lines as I have quoted. It is significant, however, that Cowper writes under the influence of the Evangelical revival. More moderate Anglicans were less inclined to attack the excesses of Shaftesburian natural theology and natural ethics than tacitly to recognize allies in the struggle against materialism, mechanism, and the atheism (as they did not scruple to call it) of the tradition of Hobbes and Mandeville.

Thomson was but one of a series of poets who responded to the influence of Shaftesbury, but he will serve as sufficient example. In The Seasons he established the tradition of the long descriptive and reflective poem in blank verse which centered in nature and reached out from the individual scene to contemplate the scheme of things in its larger aspects: the tradition which culminates in Wordsworth's Prelude.