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.

His poem on Liberty is not equally good: his Muse was too easy and
good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against
unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutional
monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the
establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of
hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was but an
indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of
liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is
the soul of patriotism, and of public good: but you would not expect a
man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his
waistcoat pockets, to be "overrun with the spleen," or to heat himself
needlessly about an abstract proposition.

His plays are liable to the same objection. They are never acted, and
seldom read. The author could not, or would not, put himself out of his
way, to enter into the situations and passions of others, particularly
of a tragic kind. The subject of Tancred and Sigismunda, which is taken
from a serious episode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorly
handled: the ground may be considered as still unoccupied.

Cowper, whom I shall speak of in this connection, lived at a
considerable distance of time after Thomson; and had some advantages
over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision
and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and
leisurely choice of such topics only as his ge