Though Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, each in his own way, turned their eye on rural scenery, and took beautiful pictures and images from it into their poetry, yet it was none of these, but a later poet, Cowper, who, as the true successor of Thomson, carried on the descriptive work which he began. It was in 1730 that the first complete edition of the “Seasons” appeared. “The Task” was published in 1785. This is the poem in which Cowper most fully put forth his power as a rural poet. In the first book, “The Sofa,” he thus quaintly makes the first plunge from indoor to outdoor life, to which many a time ere the long poem is ended he returns:—
“The Sofa suits
The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb,
Though on a sofa, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink,
E’er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds,