cliffs.
With holy reverence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song.
Here from the desart, down the rumbling steep,
First springs the Nile: here bursts the sounding Po
In angry waves: Euphrates hence devolves
A mighty flood to water half the East:
And there, in Gothic solitude reclin'd,
The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn.
What solemn twilight! What stupendous shades
Enwrap these infant floods! Through every nerve
A sacred horror thrills, a pleasing fear
Glides o'er my frame. The forest deepens round;
And more gigantic still th' impending trees
Stretch their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.
Are these the confines of another world?
A land of Genii? Say, beyond these wilds
What unknown regions? If indeed beyond
Aught habitable lies.

This has more majesty, and more to fill the imagination, than the
corresponding paragraph in Thomson's Autumn.

Say then where lurk the vast eternal springs, &c.--771.

Yet it is inferior in beauty to some verses in a Latin poem by a writer
who is now living.

Quippe sub immensis terrae penetralibus altae
Hiscunt in vastum tenebrae: magnarum ibi princeps
labitur undarum Oceanus, quo patre liquoris
Omnigeni latices et mollis lentor aquai
Profluxere, nova nantes aestate superne
Aerii rores nebularum, et liquidus imber.
Fama est perpetuos illinc se erumpere fontes,
Florigerum Ladona, et lubrica vitra Selemni,
Crathidaque, imbriferamque Lycaeis vallibus Hagno,
Et gelidam Panopin et Peirenen lacrymosam,
Illinc et rapido amnes fluere et mare magnum.

In the third book, he once more breathes freely, and in recounting the
various kinds of exercise by which the human frame may be invigorated,
his poetic faculty again finds room to play. Joseph Warton, in his Essay
on Pope, has justly commended the Episode on the Sweating Sickness, with
which it concludes. In the fourth and last, on the Passions, he seems to
have grown weary of his task; for he has here less compression and less
dignity.

His verse is much more compact than Thomson's, whom he resembles most in
the turn of the expression; although he has aimed now and then, but with
an ill-assured and timid hand, at a Miltonic boldness in the numbers or
the phrase. When he takes occasion to speak of the river with which his
remembrances in early life were associated, he has, contrary to his
usual custom, indulged himself with enlarging on