The cattle mourn in corners, where the fence Screens them, and seem half-petrified to sleep In unrecumbent sadness.  There they wait Their wonted fodder; not like hungering man, Fretful if unsupplied; but silent, meek, And patient of the slow-paced swain’s delay. He from the stack carves out the accustomed load Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft, His broad keen knife into the solid mass:  Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands, With such undeviating and even force He severs it away:  no needless care, Lest storms should overset the leaning pile Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.  Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern’d The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear, from, morn to eve, his solitary task.  Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears And tail cropp’d short, half lurcher and half cur, His dog attends him.  Close behind his heel Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout; Then shakes his powder’d coat, and barks for joy.  Heedless of all his pranks, the sturdy churl Moves right toward the mark; nor stops for aught But now and then with pressure of his thumb To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube, That fumes beneath his nose:  the trailing cloud Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.

The minutely faithful description of the man carving the load of hay out of the stack, and again those of the gambolling dog, and the woodman smoking his pipe with the stream of smoke trailing behind him, remind us of the touches of minute fidelity in Homer.  The same may be said of many other passages.

    The sheepfold here
  Pours out its fleecy tenants o’er the glebe.
  At first, progressive as a stream they seek
  The middle field:  but, scatter’d by degrees,
  Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land. 
  There from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps
  The loaded wain:  while lighten’d of its charge,
  The wain that meets it passes swiftly by;
  The boorish driver leaning o’er his team
  Vociferous and impatient of delay.

A specimen of more imaginative and distinctly poetical description is the well-known passage on evening, in writing which Cowper would seem to have had Collins in his mind.

  Come, Evening, once again, season of peace,
  Return, sweet Evening, and continue long! 
  Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,
  With matron-step slow-moving, while the Night
  Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employed
  In letting fall the curtain of repose
  On bird and beast, the other charged for man
  With sweet oblivion of the cares of day: 
  Not sumptuously adorn’d, nor needing aid,
  Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems! 
  A star or two just twinkling on thy brow
  Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine
  No less than hers, not worn indeed on high
  With ostentatious pageantry, but set. 
  With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
  Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.