And now Hyperion from his glitt’ring throne
Sev’n times his quick’ning rays had bravely shown
Unto the other world, since Walla last
Had on her Tavy’s head the garland plac’d;
And this day, as of right, she wends abroad
To ease the meadows of their willing load. 

          
                                                (II. iii. 855.)

At times it was Browne’s moral preoccupation that curbed his muse, as in his description of the golden age where, for the sensuous glow of Tasso and for Carew’s pagan paradise, he substitutes the insipid convention of a philosophical age of innocence[137].  In his genuine mood as a loving observer of country life he is a very different poet.  His feeling is delicate in tone and his observation keen; he was familiar with every tree that grew in the woods, every fish that swam in the waters of his beloved Devon; he entered tenderly into the homely life of the farm—­

    By this had chanticleer, the village clock,
    Bidden the goodwife for her maids to knock,
    And the swart ploughman for his breakfast stay’d,
    That he might till those lands were fallow laid;
    The hills and vailles here and there resound
    With the re-echoes of the deep-mouth’d hound;
    Each shepherd’s daughter, with her cleanly peal,[138]
    Was come afield to milk the morning’s meal. 
                                (I. iv. 483.)

When, however, naturalism of this kind is introduced into pastoral it is already on the high road toward ceasing to be pastoral at all.  Nor are touches of higher poetic imagination wanting, as when Time is described as

          a lusty aged swain,

That cuts the green tufts off th’ enamell’d plain,
And with his scythe hath many a summer shorn
The plough’d-lands lab’ring with a crop of corn. 

          
                                                (I. iv. 307.)

The love of his country is, however, the altar at which Browne’s poetic genius takes fire: 

Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot,
Whose equal all the world affordeth not! 
Show me who can so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-cloth’d valleys or aspiring hills,.... 
And if the earth can show the like again,
Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. 
Time never can produce men to o’ertake
The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake,
Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more
That by their power made the Devonian shore
Mock the proud Tagus, for whose richest spoil
The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soil
Bankrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost
By winning this, though all the rest were lost. 

          
                                                              (II. iii. 601.)