Here lofty trees to ancient song unknown
The noble sons of potent heat and floods
Prone-rushing from the clouds, rear high to heaven
Their thorny stems, and broad around them throw
Meridian gloom.
(“Summer,” 653 foll.)[121]

The “return to Nature,” of which Thomson was perhaps the most noteworthy pioneer, brought back all the sights and sounds of outdoor life as subjects fit and meet for the poet’s song, and it is therefore of some interest, in the present connexion, to note that Wordsworth himself, who also knew how to make excellent use of high-sounding Latin formations, has perhaps nowhere illustrated this faculty better than in the famous passage on the Yew Trees of Borrowdale:

Those fraternal Four of Borrowdale
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove:
Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved;
Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.

But the bulk of eighteenth century latinisms fall within a different category; rarely do they convey, either in themselves or in virtue of their context, any of that mysterious power of association which constitutes the poetic value of words and enables the writer, whether in prose or verse, to convey to his reader delicate shades of meaning and suggestion which are immediately recognized and appreciated.