This case appears to bear strongly against us:—­but we must distinguish between wonder and legitimate admiration.  The subject of the work is the changes produced in the appearances of Nature by the revolution of the year:  and, by undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself to treat his subject as became a Poet.  Now it is remarkable that, excepting the nocturnal ‘Reverie’ of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the ‘Windsor Forest’ of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the ‘Paradise Lost’ and the ‘Seasons’ does not contain a single new image of external Nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.  To what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had sunk, is evident from the style in which Dryden has executed a description of Night in one of his Tragedies, and Pope his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the ‘Iliad.’  A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth.  Dryden’s lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless;[14] those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory.  The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold upon public estimation,—­nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers.  Strange to think of an enthusiast, as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!—­If these two distinguished writers could habitually think that the visible universe was of so little consequence to a poet, that it was scarcely necessary for him to cast his eyes upon it, we may be assured that those passages of the older poets which faithfully and poetically describe the phenomena of Nature, were not at that time holden in much estimation, and that there was little accurate attention paid to those appearances.

[14] CORTES alone in a night-gown.

All things are hush’d as Nature’s self lay dead; The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head.  The little Birds in dreams their songs repeat, And sleeping Flowers beneath the Night-dew sweat:  Even Lust and Envy sleep; yet Love denies Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes.

DRYDEN’s Indian Emperor.