e, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper
contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the
most part, in tranquil images--for his life was passed amidst tranquil
nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power.
Cowper says--

"On the flood,
Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight
Lies undissolved, _while silently beneath,
And unperceived, the current steals away_."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been
quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of
asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have
written them--could have chilled one's very blood with such intense
feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
_And to the stony deep his idle ship
Immediate seal'd_, he with his hapless crew,
Each full exerted at his several task,
_Froze into statues; to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!_"

The oftener--the more we read the "Winter"--especially the last two or
three hundred lines--the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for
asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter"
immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious
style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but
for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his
fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all
committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his
imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to
him at the time to be poetry--though sometimes it was but "false
glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is
somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages,
without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his
inspirations. He luxuriates--he revels--he wantons--at once with an
imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young;
and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical
language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of
profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study,
while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a
charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and
versification of the