er guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day
fertile in English literature."

We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more
spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to
undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared
with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with
Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with
Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like
approach to the innermost arcana--with a dozen other moods familiar to
the modern mind--it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened,
as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the
vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave
our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric,
more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's
landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To
a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the
revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which
describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the
trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night,
were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English
poetry.

That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with
his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like
"auriculas with shining meal";

"The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;"

or,

"The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed,
To shake the sounding marsh."[6]

Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never
false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he
speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little
fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and
finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's
comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to
have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have
led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the
harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet
I still feel the latter to have been the born poet."

The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley