d he had
blotted a thousand!"--The same suavity of temper and sanguine warmth
of feeling which threw such a natural grace and genial spirit of
enthusiasm over his poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vices and
defects. He is affected through carelessness: pompous from unsuspecting
simplicity of character. He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in
his style, because he had no consciousness of these vices in himself. He
mounts upon stilts, not out of vanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a
good line, but he makes up for it by a bad one. He takes advantage of
all the most trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction
as a kindly relief to his Muse, and as if he thought them quite as good,
and likely to be quite as acceptable to the reader, as his own poetry.
He did not think the difference worth putting himself to the trouble of
accomplishing. He had too little art to conceal his art: or did not even
seem to know that there was any occasion for it. His art is as naked and
undisguised as his nature; the one is as pure and genuine as the other
is gross, gaudy, and meretricious.--All that is admirable in the
Seasons, is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of
his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled for, and departs
unbidden. But he takes no pains, uses no self-correction; or if he seems
to labour, it is worse than labour lost. His genius "cannot be
constrained by mastery." The feeling of nature, of the changes of the
seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling
to the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression; but if the
expression did not come of itself, he left the whole business to chance;
or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his
subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid
and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a
bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or
image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the
shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely,
fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth.

"Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come,
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend."

Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this,
woul