This is evidently genuine and spontaneous.  We stand with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin on the hill in the ruffling wind, like them, scarcely conscious that it blows, and feed admiration at the eye upon the rich and thoroughly English champaign that is outspread below.

Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, Exhilarate the spirit, and restore The tone of languid Nature.  Mighty winds, That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood Of ancient growth, make music not unlike The dash of Ocean on his winding shore, And lull the spirit while they nil the mind; Unnumber’d branches waving in the blast, And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.  Nor less composure waits upon the roar Of distant floods, or on the softer voice Of neighbouring fountain, or of rills that slip Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of their silent course.  Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds, But animated nature sweeter still, To soothe and satisfy the human ear.  Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one The livelong night:  nor these alone, whose notes Nice-finger’d Art must emulate in vain, But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime In still-repeated circles, screaming loud, The jay, the pie, and e’en the boding owl That hails the rising moon, have charms for me.  Sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh, Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns, And only there, please highly for their sake.

Affection such as the last lines display for the inharmonious as well as the harmonious, for the uncomely, as well as the comely parts of nature has been made familiar by Wordsworth, but it was new in the time of Cowper.  Let us compare a landscape painted by Pope in his Windsor forest, with the lines just quoted, and we shall see the difference between the art of Cowper, and that of the Augustan age.

  Here waving groves a checkered scene display,
  And part admit and part exclude the day,
  As some coy nymph her lover’s warm address
  Not quite indulges, nor can quite repress. 
  There interspersed in lawns and opening glades
  The trees arise that share each other’s shades;
  Here in full light the russet plains extend,
  There wrapt in clouds, the bluish hills ascend,
  E’en the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
  And midst the desert fruitful fields arise,
  That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn. 
  Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.

The low Berkshire hills wrapt in clouds on a sunny day; a sable desert in the neighbourhood of Windsor; fruitful fields arising in it, and crowned with tufted trees and springing corn—­evidently Pope saw all this, not on an eminence, in the ruffling wind, but in his study with his back to the window, and the Georgics or a translation of them before him.

Here again is a little picture of rural life from the Winter Morning Walk.