in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in
"Spring":

"Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow
The bursting prospect spreads immense around,
And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn,
And verdant field and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees,
And spiry town, by surging columns marked
Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . .
To where the broken landscape, by degrees
Ascending, roughens into rigid hills,
O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds,
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise."

"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England,
and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled
me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a
defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck
the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he
rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere
catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in
which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of
vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from
the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this
enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest
estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured
laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real
area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the
fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square
furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable
cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by
unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing,
overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the
pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a
master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue."

Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said
that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but
complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth,
not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over
landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abound