My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm; all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a wife in my hut.
The beginning of his Country Life shews that moralizing was still in the air:
Happy the man who has the town escaped!
To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks,
The shining pebbles preach
Virtue's and wisdom's lore....
The nightingale on him sings slumber down;
The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet,
When shines the lovely red
Of morning through the trees.