Now I imagine you are seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on the fading of the year—now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive, amidst brown withered groves; whilst the leaves rustle under your feet, the sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds—

Stir the faint note, and but attempt to sing.

Then again, when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known cleugh, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick, embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades; while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling, awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene at an easy rate:—None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit, and disport in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance. But where is the living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that elegantly please the lover of Nature. Nature delights me in every form. I am just now painting her in her most luxurious dress; for my own amusement, describing winter as it presents itself. After my first proposal of the subject—

I sing of winter, and his gelid reign;
Nor let a ryming insect of the spring
Deem it a barren theme, to me 'tis full
Of manly charms: to me, who court the shade,
Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun
The glare of summer. Welcome, kindred glooms!
Drear awful wintry horrors, welcome all! &c.

After this introduction, I say, which insists for a few lines further, I prosecute the purport of the following ones:—

Nor can I, O departing Summer! choose
But consecrate one pitying line to you:
Sing your last temper'd days and sunny balms,
That cheer the spirits and serene the soul.

Then terrible floods, and high winds, that usually happen about this time of the year, and have already happened here (I wish you have not felt them too dreadfully); the first produced the enclosed lines; the last are not completed. Mr. Rickleton's poem on Winter, which I still have, first put the design into my head—in it are some masterly strokes that awakened me—being only a present amusement, it is ten to one but I drop it whenever another fancy comes across. I believe it had been much more for your entertainment, if in this letter I had cited other people instead of myself; but I must refer that till another time. If you have not seen it already, I have just now in my hands an original of Sir Alexander Brands (the crazed Scots knight of the woeful countenance), you would relish. I believe it might make Mis[48] John catch hold of his knees, which I take in him to be a degree of mirth, only inferior, to fall back again with an elastic spring. It is very [here a word is waggishly obliterated] printed in the Evening Post: so, perhaps you have seen these panegyrics of our declining bard; one on the Princess's birth-day; the other on his Majesty's, in [obliterated] cantos, they are written in the spirit of a complicated craziness. I was lately in London a night, and in the old play-house saw a comedy acted, called Love makes a Man, or the Fop's Fortune, where I beheld Miller and Cibber shine to my infinite entertainment. In and about London this month of September, near a hundred people have died by accident and suicide. There was one blacksmith tired of the hammer, who hung himself, and left written behind him this concise epitaph:—

I, Joe Pope,
Lived without hope
And died by a rope.

Or else some epigrammatic Muse has belied him.