The obvious fact that these poets centered their attention upon Man, particularly in his social life, and that their most memorable productions are upon that theme, led posterity to complain that they wholly lacked interest in Nature, were incapable of delineating it, and did not feel its sacred influence.  The last point in the indictment,—­and the last only,—­is quite true.  No one who understood and believed, as they did, the doctrines of orthodoxy could consistently ascribe divinity to Nature.  To them Nature exhibited the power of God, but not his will; and the soul of Man gained its clearest moral light directly from a supernatural source.  This did not, however, imply that Nature was negligible.  The celebrated essays of Addison on the pleasures of the imagination (Spectator, Nos. 411-414) base those pleasures upon the grandeur of Nature; upon its variety and freshness, as of “groves, fields, and meadows in the opening of the Spring”; and upon its beauty of form and color.  The works of Nature, declares Addison, surpass those of art, and accordingly “we always find the poet in love with a country life.”  Such was the theory; the practice was not out of accord therewith.  Passages appreciative of the lovelier aspects of Nature, and not, despite the current preference for general rather than specific terms, inaccurate as descriptions, were written between 1700 and 1726 by Addison himself, Pope, Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Parnell, Dyer, and many others.  Nature worshippers they were not.  Nature lovers they can be justly styled,—­if such love may discriminate between the beautiful and the ugly aspects of the natural.  It is characteristic that Berkeley, in his Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, does not indulge the fancy that the wilderness is of itself uplifting; it requires, he assumes, the aid of human culture and wisdom,—­“the rise of empire and of arts,”—­to develop its potentialities.

A generation which placidly adhered to the orthodox sentiments of its predecessors was of course not moved to revolutionize poetical theories or forms.  Its theories are authoritatively stated in Pope’s Essay on Criticism; they embrace principles of good sense and mature taste which are easier to condemn than to confute or supersede.  In poetical diction the age cultivated clearness, propriety, and dignity:  it rejected words so minutely particular as to suggest pedantry or specialization; and it refused to sacrifice simple appropriateness to inaccurate vigor of utterance or meaningless beauty of sound.  Its favorite measure, the decasyllabic couplet, moulded by Jonson, Sandys, Waller, Denham, and Dryden, it accepted reverently, as an heirloom not to be essentially altered but to be polished until it shone more brightly than ever.  Pope perfected this form, making it at once more artistic and more natural.  He discountenanced on the one hand run-on lines, alexandrines, hiatus, and sequence of monosyllables; on the other, the resort to expletives and the mechanical placing of caesura.  If his verse does not move with the “long resounding pace” of Dryden at his best, it has a movement better suited to the drawing-room:  it is what Oliver Wendell Holmes terms