"Seasons"--above all, in the closing strains of the
"Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and
wonder seldom breathed upon us--glorious poem, on the whole, as it
is--from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school,
know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and
Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!
Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of
English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here
they are:--

"The godlike face of man avails him nought!
Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance
The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze,
Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.
But if, apprised of the severe attack,
The country be shut up, lured by the scent,
On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!)
The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig
The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which,
Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye--they think us ugly
customers--and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an
awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf
seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person
would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of
wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in
any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so,
then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about
"beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves
some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all
fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood,
merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat
to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis
all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at
beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain
sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past
without eating her--but simply because, an hour or two before, he had
dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart