he strains of a poet who painted nature in all her
moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most
_unfortunate_ in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many
that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr
Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his
preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the
_prepared sympathies_ of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of
those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and
who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate
attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever
fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in
vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has
desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was
necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had
met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth
known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his
own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more
popular than he supposed it to be--and Heaven be praised, for the honour
of the age, it was and is so!--never had they been written, nor had he
here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is
bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always
will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer.
That Thomson, in "The Seasons," _sometimes_ writes a _vicious style_,
may be true; but it is not true that he _often_ does so. His style has
its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the
web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate--especially
to dunces. But its _virtue is divine_; and that _divine virtue_, even in
this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than
_earthly vice_--be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions--is a
creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the
great author of "The Excursion."

That many did--do--and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in
"The Seasons"--won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism,
is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may
be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and
man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapso