s like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock would
With charitable bill (O bill, fore-shaming
The rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!) bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse.

This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and
fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper
sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling.

His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside,
the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic
is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to
grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its
fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and
"warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had
perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too
attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book
of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for
the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too
complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be
confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or
design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is,
I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius.

--Her young meanwhile
Callow and cold, from their moss-woven nest
Peep forth; they stretch their little eager throats
Broad to the wind, and plead to the lone spray
Their famish'd plaint importunately shrill.

(_English Garden_, b. 3.)

--Volucrum sic turba recentum,
Cum reducem longo prospexit in aethere matrem,
Ire cupit contra, summaque e margine nidi
Extat hians; jam jamque cadat ni pectore toto
Obstet aperta parens et amantibus increpet alis.

(_Theb._ lib. x. 458.)

Oppian's imitation of this is happier.

[Greek: Os dhopot aptaenessi pherei bosin dortalichoisi
Maetaer, eiarinae Zephurou protangelos ornis,
Oi dapalon truzontes epithroskousi kaliae,
Gaethusunoi peri maetri, kai imeirontes edodaes
Xeilos anaptussousin apan depi doma lelaeken
Andros xeinodochoio liga klazousi neossois.]

(Halieut. I. in. 248.)

Hurd, in the letter h