The poetical possibilities of sentimentalism were not grasped by any noteworthy poet before Thomson. The Seasons was an innovation, and its novelty lay not so much in the choice of the subject as in the interpretation.  Didactic as well as descriptive, it was designed not merely to present realistic pictures but to arouse certain explicitly stated thoughts and feelings.  Thomson had absorbed some of Shaftesbury’s ideas.  Such sketches as that of the hardships which country folk suffer 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 Magazine advanced what must have seemed the outrageously paradoxical thought that the savage in the wilderness was happier than civilized man.  Two years later Soame Jenyns openly assailed in verse the orthodox doctrines of sin and retribution.  These had long been assailed in prose; and under the influence of the attacks, within the pale of the Church itself, some ministers had suppressed or modified the sterner aspects of the creed,—­a movement which Young’s satires had ridiculed in the person of a lady of fashion who gladly entertained the notion that the Deity was