Thompson is a describer in detail, and in certain passages he is an enumerator. There is no relation in his poems to life as depicted in the Tamil poets. Thompson, however, essayed to learn from Nature and to philosophize from its appearances, as the Tamil poets did. With the Tamil poets such ethical and philosophic observations are just briefly alluded as is natural to a literature long used to them. In Thompson, they seem new and sometimes laboured like the moralist searching for lessons in Nature, not just noting what he could not but see.

cotland nursed many genuine poets of Nature, and irregular, wild and mountainous country as it is, it bred many a poet with a feeling for montane Nature. Among them Burns has a foremost place, and he is interesting to us because of the manner in which he gave man the first place, and Nature, the second place, and the mode in which he wove Nature and lovers. "Always Nature was second, humanity first-the background, sometimes used like a theatrical property for the human act and passion he sung."¹⁷ "Theatrical property" is a suitable phrase to describe also the Cankam concept of Nature provided we understand it as a moving, living, feeling "theatrical property".

Gray in his Elegy and Collins in his Ode to Evening, exemplify in some manner the sympathetic interpretation of Nature, but it is in Wordsworth, as Stopford Brooke points out, that Naturalism reached its culmination. The Greek and Latin poets when they wished to address the objects of Nature, often addressed the gods who were supposed to be their guardians. The Tamil poets made an advance when they addressed the objects and not the gods of those objects, as when under the influence of love and grief a heroine asks of the ocean why it wails, by whom it has been left abandoned. But Wordsworth strikes a new note in his line:

Nature was represented in Greek and Latin poetry as the platform on which the drama of man was enacted. In Tamil

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   ¹⁷ STOPFORD A.BROOKE, Naturalism in English Poetry, London, 1920, p. 130.