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, abounding in Latinisms like effusive, precipitant, irriguous, horrific, turgent, amusive.  The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress is bathing—­that celebrated “serio-comic bathing”—­is described as “the latent Damon”; and when the poet advises against the use of worms for trout bait, he puts it thus: 

    “But let not on your hook the tortured worm
    Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds,” etc.

The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton’s “mountain nymph, sweet Liberty,” but quite as frequently by Shenstone’s nymph, “coy Elegance,” who kept reminding them of Vergil.

Thomson’s blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper’s, is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton—­as Cowper’s is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of “The Seasons,” which he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet “caps the climax of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a dozen pages,” viz.: 

    “And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave.” 
    “And Mecca saddens at the long delay.” 
    “And Thule bellows through her utmost isles.”

It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric line, e.g. ("Summer,” 859),

    “And Ocean trembles for his green domain.”

For the blank verse of “The Seasons” is a blank verse which has been passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet.  Though Thomson, in the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the greatest contrast to Pope’s system of versification; yet wherever he seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope’s antithetical trick than of Shakspere’s or Milton’s freer structure.  For instance ("Spring,” 1015): 

    “Fills every sense and pants in every vein.”

or (Ibid. 1104): 

    “Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins.”

To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions:  advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the “Georgics”; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and Amelia in “Summer,” and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in “Autumn”; while ever