in winter, contrasted with the thoughtless gayety of city revelers,
and inculcating the lesson of sympathy, are precisely in the vein that
sentimentalism encouraged. So, too, the tendency of Shaftesbury to deify
Nature appears in several ardent passages. The choice of blank verse
as the medium of this liberal and expansive train of thought was
appropriate. It should not be supposed, however, that Thomson accepted
sentimentalism in its entirety or fully understood its ultimate bearings.
The author of _Rule, Britannia_ praised many things,--like commerce
and industry and imperial power,--that are not favored by the thorough
sentimentalist. Often he was inconsistent: his _Hymn to Nature_ is
in part a pantheistic rhapsody, in part a monotheistic Hebrew psalm.
Essentially an indolent though receptive mind, he made no effort to trace
the new ideas to their consequences; he vaguely considered them not
irreconcilable with the old.

A keener mind fell into the same error. Pope, in the _Essay on Man_,
tried to harmonize the orthodox conception of human character with
sentimental optimism. As a collection of those memorable half-truths
called aphorisms, the poem is admirable; as an attempt to unite new
half-truths with old into a consistent scheme of life, it is fallacious.
No creature composed of such warring elements as Pope describes in the
superb antitheses that open Epistle II, can ever become in this world as
good and at the same time as happy as Epistle IV vainly asserts. Pope,
charged with heresy, did not repeat this endeavor to console mankind; he
returned to his proper element, satire. But his effort to unite the
new philosophy with the old psychology is striking evidence of the
attractiveness and growing vogue of Shaftesbury's theories.

It was minor poets who first expressed sentimental ideas without
inconsistency. As early as 1732, anonymous lines in the _Gentleman's