Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
In mingled clouds to Him, whose sun exalts,
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.
Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him;
Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.

* * * * *

Great source of day! best image here below
Of thy Creator, ever pouring wide,
From world to world, the vital ocean round,
On Nature write with every beam His praise.
The thunder rolls: be hushed the prostrate world;
While cloud to cloud returns the solemn hymn.
Bleat out afresh, ye hills; ye mossy rocks
Retain the sound: the broad responsive low,
Ye valleys, raise; for the Great Shepherd reigns,
And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come.'

Swift complains that the _Seasons_, being all descriptive, nothing is
doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's
best gift--imagination--and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm
of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.

Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge
observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his
account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the
ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he
observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is
faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can
be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar
scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper
shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of
description, shall be quoted from _Winter_:

'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun,
Faint from the west, emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all