"And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave."
"And Mecca saddens at the long delay."
"And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric line, e.g. ("Summer," 859),
"And Ocean trembles for his green domain."
For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For instance ("Spring," 1015):
"Fills every sense and pants in every vein."
or (Ibid. 1104):
"Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins."
To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls Goldsmith's stanza:[15]
"No flocks that range the valley free
To slaughter I condemn:
Taught by the power that pities me,
I learn to pity them."
This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person, yet even Pope had written