“While through the west, where sinks the crimson day,
    Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray.”

It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to say ill-natured things, (Horace Walpole among them,) that in the later years of his life he forgot his first love of Liberalism and became politically conservative.  But it must be remembered that the good poet lived into the time when the glut and gore of the French Revolution made people hold their breath, and when every man who lifted a humane plaint against the incessant creak and crash of the guillotine was reckoned by all mad reformers a conservative.  I think, if I had lived in that day, I should have been a conservative, too,—­however much the pretty and bloody Desmoulins might have made faces at me in the newspapers.

I can find nothing in Mason’s didactic poem to quote.  There are tasteful suggestions scattered through it,—­better every way than his poetry.  The grounds of his vicarage at Aston must have offered charming loitering-places.  I will leave him idling there,—­perhaps conning over some letter of his friend the poet Gray; perhaps lounging in the very alcove where he had inscribed this verse of the “Elegy,”—­

    “Here scattered oft, the loveliest of the year,
      By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
    The redbreast loves to build and warble here,
      And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”

If, indeed, he had known how to strew such gems through his “English Garden,” we should have had a poem that would have out-shone “The Seasons.”

And this mention reminds me, that, although I have slipped past his period, I have said no word as yet of the Roxburgh poet; but he shall be neglected no longer. (The big book, my boy, upon the third shelf, with a worn back, labelled THOMSON.)

This poet is not upon the gardeners’ or the agricultural lists.  One can find no farm-method in him,—­indeed, little method of any sort; there is no description of a garden carrying half the details that belong to Tasso’s garden of Armida, or Rousseau’s in the letter of St. Preux.[E] And yet, as we read, how the country, with its woods, its valleys, its hillsides, its swains, its toiling cattle, comes swooping to our vision!  The leaves rustle, the birds warble, the rivers roar a song.  The sun beats on the plain; the winds carry waves into the grain; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains.  The minuteness and the accuracy of his observation are something wonderful; if farmers should not study him, our young poets may. He never puts a song in the throat of a jay or a wood-dove; he never makes a mother-bird break out in bravuras; he never puts a sickle into green grain, or a trout in a slimy brook; he could picture no orchis growing on a hillside, or columbine nodding in a meadow.  If the leaves shimmer, you may be sure the sun is shining; if a primrose lightens on the view, you may be sure there is some covert which the primroses love; and never by any license does a white flower come blushing into his poem.