d 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 upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the same
unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The
colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of
the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions is
seen growing around us, fresh and lusty as in itself. We feel the effect
of the atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heat or cold, the glow
of summer, the gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the
full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of
autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or
plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone.
We hear the snow drifting against the broken casement without, and see
the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a
vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm
resounds through the