dy on Love--one passage
of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the
Seasons--and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon
watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never
account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the
"Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson
had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath,
nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady
turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of
her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was--nor could have
been--when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem.
Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at
total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people
admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on
Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in
Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is
it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth,
earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are
the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in
first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson
abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve
to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human
feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the
philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and
its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most
poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions
prevail; but still, so far from being either _vicious_ or _worthless_,
they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the
children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation
of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example,
and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth
say--in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first
(and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale
is still read by all simple minds) the most popular--that that story is
a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is