other is gross, gaudy, and meretricious.—­All that is admirable in the Seasons, is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled for, and departs unbidden.  But he takes no pains, uses no self-correction; or if he seems to labour, it is worse than labour lost.  His genius “cannot be constrained by mastery.”  The feeling of nature, of the changes of the seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling to the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression; but if the expression did not come of itself, he left the whole business to chance; or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth.

      “Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come,
      And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
      While music wakes around, veil’d in a shower
      Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.”

Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion through this and the following cantos?  For instance, the very next passage is crowded with a set of striking images.

      “And see where surly Winter passes off
      Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts: 
      His blasts obey, and quit the howling hill,
      The shatter’d forest, and the ravag’d vale;
      While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch
      Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost,
      The mountains lift their green heads to the sky. 
      As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed,
      And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze,
      Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets
      Deform the day delightless; so that scarce
      The bittern knows his time with bill ingulpht
      To shake the sounding marsh, or from the shore
      The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
      And sing their wild notes to the list’ning waste.”

Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets:  for he gives most of the poetry of natural description.  Others have been quite equal to him, or have surpassed him, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque part of his art, in marking the peculiar features and curious details of objects;—­no one has yet come up to him in giving the sum total of their effects, their varying influences on the mind.  He does not go into the minutiae of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes