Yet it is inferior in beauty to some verses in a Latin poem by a writer who is now living.
Quippe sub immensis terrae penetralibus altae
Hiscunt in vastum tenebrae: magnarum ibi princeps
labitur undarum Oceanus, quo patre liquoris
Omnigeni latices et mollis lentor aquai
Profluxere, nova nantes aestate superne
Aerii rores nebularum, et liquidus imber.
Fama est perpetuos illinc se erumpere fontes,
Florigerum Ladona, et lubrica vitra Selemni,
Crathidaque, imbriferamque Lycaeis vallibus Hagno,
Et gelidam Panopin et Peirenen lacrymosam,
Illinc et rapido amnes fluere et mare magnum.
In the third book, he once more breathes freely, and in recounting the various kinds of exercise by which the human frame may be invigorated, his poetic faculty again finds room to play. Joseph Warton, in his Essay on Pope, has justly commended the Episode on the Sweating Sickness, with which it concludes. In the fourth and last, on the Passions, he seems to have grown weary of his task; for he has here less compression and less dignity.
His verse is much more compact than Thomson's, whom he resembles most in the turn of the expression; although he has aimed now and then, but with an ill-assured and timid hand, at a Miltonic boldness in the numbers or the phrase. When he takes occasion to speak of the river with which his remembrances in early life were associated, he has, contrary to his usual custom, indulged himself with enlarging on his prototype.
Thomson had mentioned incidentally the Tweed and the Jed:
—The Tweed, pure parent stream,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed,
With sylvan Jed! thy tributary brook.—Autumn, 889.
He has thus expanded it:—
—Such the stream,
On whose Arcadian banks I first drew air,
Liddal; till now, except in Doric lays
Tun'd to her murmurs by her love-sick swains,
Unknown in song: though not a purer stream,
Through meads more flowery, or more romantic groves,
Rolls towards the western main. Hail, sacred flood!
May still thy hospitable swains be blest
In rural innocence; thy mountains still
Teem with the fleecy race; thy tuneful woods
For ever flourish; and thy vales look gay
With painted meadows, and the golden grain!
Oft with thy blooming sons, when life was new,
Sportive and petulant, and charm'd with toys,
In thy transparent eddies have I lav'd;
Oft trac'd with patient steps thy fairy banks,
With the well-imitated fly to hook
The eager trout, and with the slender line
And yielding rod, solicit to the shore
The struggling panting prey; while vernal clouds
And tepid gales obscur'd the ruffled pool,
And from the deeps call'd forth the wanton swarms.
B. iii. v. 96.
What he has here added of his love of fishing is from another passage in the Seasons [3].