Creativity Quote by James Thomson

Thomson writes like someone trying to rescue awe from the slow leak of familiarity. The repetition of "more" isn’t ornament; it’s escalation, a verbal swell that mimics the experience he’s selling: nature as the one arena that can still outpace our attention. He piles on registers - "poetical enthusiasm", "philosophical reflection", "moral sentiment" - not to show off, but to argue that the outdoors isn’t just pretty scenery. It’s a complete instrument, capable of playing every human note at once: feeling, thought, conscience.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to an 18th-century world increasingly organized around commerce, salons, and polite artifice. By claiming he knows "no subject" more elevating, he’s demoting everything else competing for cultural prestige: courtly taste, fashionable gossip, even purely bookish learning. Nature becomes a corrective to human systems that feel too small, too self-referential. The rhetorical questions at the end ("Where can we meet...") do what sermons do, but with less piety and more seduction: they trap the reader into agreeing that the answer is nowhere.

Context matters: Thomson is writing into the early modern rise of landscape as an aesthetic and moral category, helping pave the road toward Romanticism. His nature isn’t wild as threat; it’s wild as abundance - "variety, beauty, magnificence" - a kind of public wealth that requires no gatekeeper. The intent is persuasion by overload: if you can be moved, you should be moved here.