conscious tears
Stand thick as dewdrops on the bells of flowers."

Among the victims claimed by the grave is

'The long demurring maid,
Whose lonely unappropriated sweets
Smiled, like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.'

And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:

'Night dews fall not more gently to the ground
Nor weary worn out winds expire so soft.'

Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler
had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of
them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are
poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins.
Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover,
Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic
distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least
significant poems.

[Sidenote: James Thomson (1700-1748).]

Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as
great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for
satire. To pass to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town
for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of _The
Seasons_, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men
back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed,
shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in
his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to
use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought
face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns
the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.

James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September
11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and
there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He
began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good
sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early
age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father,
who was a Presbyterian minister, wishing that his son should follow the
same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a
pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of
more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to