nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that
response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical
experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of
imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to
add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come
to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance.
Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of
nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says

If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a meter none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore.
[Footnote: _Preludes_.]

The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however,
was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not
intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature

More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist.
Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote:
See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too,
were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting
nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's