As soon as Winter was published, Mr. Thomson sent a copy of it as a present to Mr. Joseph Mitchell, his countryman, and brother poet, who, not liking many parts of it, inclosed to him the following couplet;

  Beauties and faults so thick lye scattered here,
  Those I could read, if these were not so near.

To this Mr. Thomson answered extempore.

  Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell; why
  Appears one beauty to thy blasted eye;
  Damnation worse than thine, if worse can be,
  Is all I ask, and all I want from thee.

Upon a friend’s remonstrating to Mr. Thomson, that the expression of blasted eye would look like a personal reflexion, as Mr. Mitchell had really that misfortune, he changed the epithet blasted, into blasting.  But to return: 

After our poet has represented the influence of Winter upon the face of nature, and particularly described the severities of the frost, he has the following beautiful transition;

  —­Our infant winter sinks,
  Divested of its grandeur; should our eye
  Astonish’d shoot into the frigid zone;
  Where, for relentless months, continual night
  Holds o’er the glitt’ring waste her starry reign: 
  There thro’ the prison of unbounded wilds
  Barr’d by the hand of nature from escape,
  Wide roams the Russian exile.  Nought around
  Strikes his sad eye, but desarts lost in snow;
  And heavy loaded groves; and solid floods,
  That stretch athwart the solitary waste,
  Their icy horrors to the frozen main;
  And chearless towns far distant, never bless’d
  Save when its annual course, the caravan
  Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay[5]
  With news of human-kind.  Yet there life glows;
  Yet cherished there, beneath the shining waste,
  The furry nations harbour:  tipt with jet
  Fair ermines, spotless as the snows they press;
  Sables of glossy black; and dark embrown’d
  Or beauteous, streak’d with many a mingled hue,
  Thousands besides, the costly pride of courts.

The description of a thaw is equally picturesque.  The following lines consequent upon it are excellent.

  —­Those sullen seas
  That wash th’ungenial pole, will rest no more
  Beneath the shackles of the mighty North;
  But rousing all their waves resistless heave.—­
  And hark! the lengthen’d roar continuous runs
  Athwart the rested deep:  at once it bursts
  And piles a thousand mountains to the clouds. 
  Ill fares the bark, with trembling wretches charg’d,
  That tost amid the floating fragments, moors
  Beneath the shelter of an icy isle,
  While night o’erwhelms the sea, and horror looks
  More horrible.  Can human force endure
  Th’ assembled mischiefs that besiege ’em round! 
  Heart-gnawing hunger, fainting weariness,
  The roar of winds and waves, the crush of ice,
  Now ceasing, now renew’d with louder rage,
  And in dire ecchoes bellowing round the main.