“Where pure Niemi’s fairy mountains rise,
      And fring’d with roses Tenglio rolls his stream,”

is equally picturesque and striking in a different way.  The traveller lost in the snow, is a well-known and admirable dramatic episode.  I prefer, however, giving one example of our author’s skill in painting common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison with the style of some later writers on such subjects.  It is of little consequence what passage we take.  The following description of the first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasing as any.

      “Through the hush’d air the whitening shower descends,
      At first thin wav’ring, till at last the flakes
      Fall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the day
      With a continual flow.  The cherish’d fields
      Put on their winter-robe of purest white: 
      ’Tis brightness all, save where the new snow melts
      Along the mazy current.  Low the woods
      Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid Sun,
      Faint, from the West emits his ev’ning ray,
      Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,
      Is one wide dazzling waste, that buries wide
      The works of man.  Drooping, the lab’rer-ox
      Stands cover’d o’er with snow, and then demands
      The fruit of all his toil.  The fowls of heav’n,
      Tam’d by the cruel season, crowd around
      The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
      Which Providence assigns them.  One alone,
      The red-breast, sacred to the household Gods,
      Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
      In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
      His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
      His annual visit.  Half-afraid, he first
      Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
      On the warm hearth; then hopping o’er the floor,
      Eyes all the smiling family askance,
      And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is: 
      Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
      Attract his slender feet.  The foodless wilds
      Pour forth their brown inhabitants.  The hare,
      Though timorous of heart, and hard beset
      By death in various forms, dark snares and dogs,
      And more unpitying men, the garden seeks,
      Urg’d on by fearless want.  The bleating kind [sic]
      Eye the bleak heav’n, and next, the glist’ning earth,
      With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers’d,
      Dig for the wither’d herb through heaps of snow.”

It is thus that Thomson always gives a moral sense to nature.

Thomson’s blank verse is not harsh, or utterly untuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill.  The selections which have been made from his works in Enfield’s Speaker, and other books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius or taste; such as Palemon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and Amelia.  Those parts of any author which are most liable to be stitched in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best.  The moral descriptions and reflections in the Seasons are in an admirable spirit, and written with great force and fervour.