"rise
from their oozy beds" to tell stories of heroes;[2] and it is therefore
strange that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural, but lately
censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a new
metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient. Nothing is easier than
to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock an obdurate
tyrant.--JOHNSON.

Descriptive poetry was by no means the shining talent of Pope. This
assertion may be manifested by the few images introduced in the poem
before us which are not equally applicable to any place whatsoever.
Rural beauty in general, and not the peculiar beauties of the forest of
Windsor, are here described. Nor are the sports of setting, shooting,
and fishing, at all more appropriated. The stag-chase, that immediately
follows, although some of the lines are incomparably good, is not so
full, so animated, and so circumstantial, as that of
Somerville.--WARTON.

Johnson remarks that this poem was written after the model of Denham's
Cooper's Hill, with, perhaps, an eye on Waller's poem of the Park.
Marvel has also written a poem on local scenery[3]--upon the hill and
grove at Billborow, and another on Appleton House (now Nunappleton), in
Yorkshire. Marvel abounds with conceits and false thoughts, but some of
the descriptive touches are picturesque and beautiful. He sometimes
observes little circumstances of rural nature with the eye and feeling
of a true poet:

Then as I careless on the bed
Of gelid strawberries do tread,
And through the hazels thick espy
The _hatching thrustle's shining eye_.

The last circumstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been
described by one who was a real lover of nature, and a witness of her
beauties in her most solitary retirements. Before this descriptive poem
on Windsor Forest, I do not recollect any other professed composition on
local scenery, except the poems of the authors already mentioned.
Denham's is certainly the best prior to Pope's: his description of
London at a distance is sublime:[4]

Under his proud survey the city lies,
And like a mist beneath a hill does rise,
Whose state and wealth, the bus'ness and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a _darker cloud_.

Pope, by the expression of "majestic," has justly characterised the flow
of Denham's couplets. It is extraordinary that Pope, who, by this
expression, seems to have appreciated the general cast of harmony