ry streaks
Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds
Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet
Which master to obey; while rising slow,
Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon
Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns.
Seen through the turbid fluctuating air,
The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray;
Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom,
And long behind them trail the whitening blaze.
Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf,
And on the flood the dancing feather floats.
With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned,
The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale....
Retiring from the downs, where all day long
They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train
Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight
And seek the closing shelter of the grove,
Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl
Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high
Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land.
Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing
The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies.
Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide
And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore,
Eat into caverns by the restless wave
And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice
That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare.

The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not
only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in
Winter:

Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year!
How mighty, how majestic, are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul
That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings!

Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated
the _Seasons_, when he had finished his _Irdisches Vergnuegen in
Gott_. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a
literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the
high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion
in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none
of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138
verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74,
while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length;
and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together,
but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional
sort. He says himself[7] that he took up the st