gleaming lakes, among rocks where the goat can scarcely find a footing, and wild heaths nibbled by hardy sheep; it is by the falls of the Lowdore or the Cynfael, among the echoes and sublimities of Ulleswater, or the clustering islands and delicate beauties of Windermere, that the poet must wait for inspiration. The muses hate the metropolis.

If we look back to the grand eras of our poetry, we shall find, mixed with the passion of our old dramatists, a great deal of natural description, and a perpetual recurrence to rural images and situations. The 'As you like it,' and the Winter's Tale,' are perfect pastorals; and there are, in other plays of Shakespeare, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Ford, sweet tracts of country scenes and country manners, not easily to be matched in the whole range of descriptive poetry. In Milton there is not a superabundance of country, if we except the Allegro and Penseroso, two poems rich with images the more pleasing, because selected with admirable judgement, and adapted to particular frames of mind and feelings. The scene of his Comus is indeed laid in a wood, but it is not therefore the more sylvan; and his Paradise exhibits, it must be confessed, a splendid assemblage of images, among which the mind wanders pleased and dazzled, but without any local associations, and indeed without any very definite perceptions. In attempting to outdo nature, he has, in our mind, fallen far short of her. A poet must indeed in one sense outdo nature, but it is only by clustering together her own beauties, not by adding those of his own imagination-roses without thorns' and Hesperian fables true.' He must never appear unnatural. From the days of Charles II, to those of Queen Anne, every body who wrote poetry seemed to think it necessary to write pastorals-Congreve and Philips, and Prior and Pope, and Littleton and Gay. But alas! these were all shepherd-boys,' and they dressed their crooks in ribbons and flowers, and they sang so fantastically, and on such strange subjects, that they frightened away the honest ruddy race of English plough-boys and milk-maids, and had no audience left but such outlandish beings as fawns, and dryads, and satyrs with cloven feet. The marriages and deaths of princes were celebrated and bemoaned by Thyrsis and Amaryllis in amabean pastorals; and the shepherds and shepherdesses, the only people who had never heard of kings and ministers, gave their opinions, while their sheep were feeding or playing, of the expediency of peace or war with the house of Bourbon.

' '

6

- Pour les peindre, il faut aimer les champs, Mais souvent, insensible à leurs charmes touchans,

Des rimeurs citadins la muse peu champêtre

Les peint sans les aimer, les peint sans les connoitre.'

Thomson, indeed, ventured out as far as Richmond; and in the seasons of Thomson, undoubtedly, are to be found some beautiful descriptions, and some eminent felicities of diction, but scarcely sufficient to redeem the general heaviness of his style, and the cumbersome monotony of his versification. On the whole, we think, the lovers of rustic simplicity were still to be justified in crying out with Horace, O rus quando ego te aspiciam ?'

At length the honours of the country were redeemed by Cowper. And Cowper painted the country with as true a taste and as warm a sensibility as ever poet possessed. The whole of his letters and his life do indeed bear witness that his ' raptures' were not

conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine.'

The fields, the woods, the garden, the cottage and its inhabitants, all meet with a fond and faithful and adequate poet in Cowper, Unfortunately, however, he was confined all his life to the tamer and more cultivated landscape, to the

• level plain

Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er ;'

the grace

Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear,

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages.'

We said, unfortunately; and yet Cowper's mind seems to have been so exactly attuned to these scenes, that we doubt whether we might not have spoiled his harmony by removing him to the latitude of Keswick. Be this as it may, the wilder and sublimer scenes of nature, rocks and clouds and cataracts, were left to other hands. Beattie did something this way; but the true poets of mountain-scenery are the lake-poets, as they have been called. To say nothing of the inferior writers of this school, (men who have disgraced, as we think, their high powers by the most puerile affectations,) Southey is as much at home by Snowdon or Cader Idris, as Cowper on the banks of the Ouse. His descriptions are so accurate, so graphical, as to please the more, the better one is acquainted with the scene described; and yet composed of features so well selected as to be uninteresting to no one. We will not quote the description of an autumnal evening in the beautiful vale of Towy*, or of

Madoc in Wales, Book 12.

an autumnal morning at sea †, or of the Welsh scenery round Cadwallon's lonely hut,' or of au American day-break §, because they ought to be familiar to every lover of poetry; but we cannot help recommending to the observation of our readers the following assemblage of rural images.

Silent and solitary is thy vale,

Caermadoc! and how melancholy now

That solitude and silence !-broad noon-day,
And not a sound of human life is there!

The fisher's net, abandon'd in his haste,

Sways idly in the waters; in the tree,

Which its last stroke had pierc'd the hatchet hangs;
The birds, beside the mattock and the spade,
Hunt in the new-turn'd mould, and fearlessly
Fly thro' the cage-work of the imperfect wall;
Or thro' the vacant dwelling's open door,

Pass and repass secure.' MADOC in AZTLAN, Book 16.

What a perfect picture of desertion!--We may just point out too, how sometimes the most general description is brought home to the feelings by a single stroke.

The solitary bard, beside his harp,

Leant underneath a tree, whose spreading boughs,
With broken shade that shifted to the breeze,
Play'd on the waving waters. Overhead
There was the leafy murmur, at his foot
The lake's perpetual ripple, and from far,
Borne on the modulating gale, was heard
The roaring of the mountain cataract-

A blind man would have lov'd the lovely spot. Id. Book, 23.
The moon arose; she shone upon the lake,
That lay one smooth expanse of silver light;
She shone upon the hills and rocks, and cast
Upon their hollows and their hidden glens

A blacker depth of shade. Who then look'd round,
Beholding all that mighty multitude,

Felt yet severer awe; so solemnly still

The thronging thousands stood. The breeze was heard,
That rustled in the reeds; the little wave,

Which rippled to the shore, and left no foam,

Sent it's low murmurs far. Id. Book 26.

To minute images, descriptive poetry owes half it's beauty. General landscapes may no doubt be brought vividly before the imagination; but it is some particular circumstance which the mind lays hold of and dwells upon, because it is some, particular circumstance which recalls scenes that we are acquainted

Madoc in Wales, Book 13. + Id Book 14.

f Madoc in Aztlan, Book 11.

scenes.

with, and the feelings and pleasures connected with those. That often quoted image of Thomson's, the cows standing in the water, or that of Cowper's, of the woodman's dog on a frosty morning

Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears,
And tail cropp'd short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow; and now with many a frisk
Wide scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powdered coat, and barks for joy:
or that beautiful description of the village-bells,

• How sweet the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still,
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on

these pictures, and a thousand others that we might quote, how many associations do they awake in a poetical mind! How sometimes a whole day of pleasure, past and almost forgotten, will spring up again in the memory, on the perusal of passages like these! And, on the other hand, when these images really present themselves in nature, the picture of the poet is recalled, and every sentiment that he has associated with it is felt with double emphasis.

To minuteness of description, however, there must be some limits. And the two following, we think, are obviously pointed out by common sense. In the first place, the objects described, however trifling, must be such as have fallen within the observation of common readers. The poet may notice, with Cowper, the different appearances of the different species of trees in a wood; but he would not be borne if he should set himself to paint the different patterns after which their leaves are veined; he may speak of the variety of colours in spring and autumn, but if he should assign the particular shade of the particular colour which characterized every tree of the forest, he might, perhaps, be acceptable as a naturalist, but he would not be read as a poet. Where we cannot recognize the truth of the description, we cannot be pleased. Secondly, the images selected must be in themselves pleasing. We do not want to descend, with Bloomfield, into all the minutiae of the stable-boy's labours; or to enter, with Crabbe, into the detail of all that is nasty and disgusting, and painful in human nature, whether in town or country. We can have enough of this at any time, by

visiting the work-house and the hospital, by attending the surgeon through his operations, or the nurse through her round of duties. All these may no doubt be described very exactly, may even be put into lines of ten syllables, accurately measured by the fingers and made to rhyme; but we are of opinion that there is no great merit in this; and at all events, we are sure that we can have enough of crime, and misery, and dirt in real life. It is to poetry that we fly from real life, as to a fairy land more beautiful and romantic than on our own world, and peopled with beings gayer and happier and more innocent than ourselves. If it is an illusion, that there is such a thing as happiness in the cottage, that the labourer sings in the cheerfulness of his heart, that kindly affections and charities dwell beneath a thatched roof,-it is at least an illusion in which we voluntarily indulge, it is a dream that we dream with our eyes open, and from which we feel no more gratitude to him that awakens us, than Horace's madman to his officious friends. But we are running away from rural poetry.

We are wandering, however, into a subject strictly connected with it. Descriptive poetry must be relieved,—whether by narrative or moral reflection, or philosophical discussion. Thomson employs all,-without any great success in any. Nothing can be imagined more dry or tedious than his wordy philosophy, or more common-place than his morality; and the tales with which he has embellished his Seasons, though generally to be found in books of excerpts, do nevertheless appear to us very unfortunate. Palemon and ther * lovely young Lavinia' take scarcely any hold upon the feelings, and the story of Musidora is as uninteresting from its inanity, as it is disgusting from its indelicacy. Cowper's Task is to the full as much a moral as a descriptive poem. External nature always suggests to him a train of reflections, adouce et longue reverie,' natural and unforced, and generally amiable and poetical. He never detains you too long with mere description. You are never tired in reading Cowper; and it is, perhaps, owing to this, that, notwithanding the occasional prosaicalness of the style, and ruggedness of the versification, and (what is more displeasing to us, though we do not know that it has been taken notice of,) the childishness and bad taste of his metaphors running out into long and forced allegories,—there are few poems more frequently taken up, or more generally acceptable than the Task. After all, however, we think narrative the most pleasing and the most natural groundwork for description, and it is in the union of an interesting fable, and of well-drawn and well supported characters, with the most ex