and again at ver. 37,
For her the flocks refuse their verdant food.
Widely different in life and vividness are the lines in which Thomson paints the flocks under their true wintry aspect, when the snow is falling, and has buried up the herbage.
The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist'ning earth,
With looks of dumb despair.
In a verse which is not original, but which is more descriptive than usual, Pope speaks of the breezes which, in spring, blow gently among the osiers:
Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play.
This is flat by the side of the passage in Thomson's Spring, where he describes the effects of the lightest current of air upon the aspen:
Not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall.
The epithet "closing" is happily applied to woods just bursting into foliage, and the epithet "many-twinkling" is exquisitely appropriate to the leaves of the aspen, which, when every other tree is still, and the air can hardly be felt to stir, dance up and down incessantly, with an endless play of light and shadow, and rustle as they wave joyously to and fro. Nature scarce affords a prettier sight, or a more soothing sound. These comparisons might be extended through pages, and they are fair examples of Pope's inferiority in a style which was unsuited to his turn of mind, and of which he had never formed adequate ideas.
Roscoe could perceive no impropriety in transferring classical customs and mythology to the plains of Windsor. He conceived that every objection was obviated by the announcement of Pope, "that pastoral is an image of the golden age," which leaves us to infer, that during this happy interlude our British shepherds adopted the manners and religion of Greece. But the golden age was itself an exploded fable, which had lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope's behalf; for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by one of Pope's shepherds, a circumstance which is intended to denote the little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia'a groves as if they had been neighbouring parishes.