Praise justly due to those that I describe.”
An ordinary prospect, you say, described in very ordinary poetry. Yes, but the scene is a real scene, one of England’s veritable landscapes, and the lines which describe it are genuine poetry,—exact, transparent, lingering lovingly over the scene which the eye rests on. And for its being ordinary description, no doubt it flows easily and naturally along, but let any one try to describe as common a prospect in verse, and he will find that this is not ordinary verse, but instinct with that unobtrusive grace which only true poets attain.
Then how frequently the commonest country sights awaken Cowper’s touch of native humor. Here is what he says of the mole and his work: we—
“Feel at every step
Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,
Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.
He, not unlike the great ones of mankind,
Disfigures earth, and, plotting in the dark,
Toils much to earn a monumental pile
That may record the mischiefs he has done.”