"With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild,
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves,"

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle
in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an
abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the
"little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale"
in Pope's complacent _Fourth Epistle_, but an æolian harp hung in some
cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.

"Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd
To smoky cities."

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of René, of Byron.

Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran the
mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To
comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as
Parnell's _Hermit_ or Addison's _Campaign_ could be regarded as
satisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we must
realise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to be
mentioned by its technical--or even by its exact name; no clear picture
was to be raised before the inner eye; nothing was to be left definite
or vivid. We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this
conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a still greater if
we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When Pope referred to the
sudden advent of a heavy shower at a funeral in these terms--