wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt (Mont Blanc 76-77) (1) THAT NATURE IS A PRIMARY TOPIC IN ENGLISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE IS commonplace. For many, Romanticism is writing, and quite rightly so, because appears this literature as if seen for first time, with a freshness, richness, depth, and intensity that has not been equalled. Nature pervades romantic thought, as notions of natural harmony, beauty, and form, of life, process, and interdependence of things are ongoing themes and standard against which artistic, ethical, and political values were measured. Nature and its powers, both visible and invisible, are constantly invoked political, aesthetic, religious, and moral debates. Often appearing personified form, as a nurse, guide, lawgiver, healer, teacher, and muse, is invoked by poets, priests, philosophers, and prophets as source and ground of beauty and truth. Many explanations have been given for advent of this important cultural phenomenon. It has been seen as a Rousseauistic return to as cultural nostalgia for simpler times, or as an escape from revolutionary history. Dialogic and dialectical models emphasizing interaction between mind and nature abound, often emphasizing power of sublime production of authorial voice, identity, and power. The emergence of Romanticism has also been seen as inseparable from coming into being of an ecological consciousness, an awareness that human beings are part of a larger physical environment that they must preserve. (2) These are valuable accounts, but they are only partial, because they do not explain why observing, writing, and talking about mattered first place or why certain kinds of appear more frequently romantic literature than do others. We take it for granted that it is perfectly natural for poets to devote so much time to describing landscapes, writing odes on seasons, and meditating on daffodils, nightingales, albatrosses, skylarks, rocks and stones and trees. (3) Why not write an Ode on an Olive Tree, or poems on spiders, bees, butterflies, moths, snow drops, violets, and Jamaican fireflies, as did Charlotte Smith? Or why not talk to a mountain, as did Percy Shelley? Accustomed to such dialogues, we do not address their puzzling qualities, leaving it for others to figure out why Shelley felt he could make a strong claim for value to be had from chatting with rocks: this Great Mountain has % voice ... to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood / By all (Mont Blanc 80-81). These explanations appear a different light when historical emergence of is set within broader global context which it was situated and from which it drew sustenance. English needs to be seen relation to new and unfamiliar natures from across globe, a burgeoning proliferation of colonial natures, that were appearing at this time both print and material culture. Viewed abstractly, nature, like gravity, may everywhere act same, but for naturalists perspective on ground was quite different. La Condamine powerfully conveys excitement with which Europeans talked about these new natures, and three primary elements of which they were composed: in a new world ... I met there with new plants, new animals, and new men. (4) In his account of his inland journey across barren winter landscape of northern Canada, Samuel Hearne declares that he will bring to his readers' view the face of a country ... which has hitherto been entirely unknown to every European except myself. (5) Europeans had been encountering new worlds for centuries, and particularly during Renaissance, with discovery of New World. Whereas early travel narratives, as Stephen Greenblatt has suggested, depicted these worlds as marvelous possessions and powerfully linked knowledge to wonder, many worlds that were documented during late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, were fashioned scientifically a context of globalized commerce. …