On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,

And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.”

How true to nature this picture! how happily rendered! Then you have the plowman and his oxen beginning their work—

“Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.”

Again,—

“From the moist meadow to the withered hill,

Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs.”

That “withered hill!” Who that has ever looked on the mountains in March, just before the first finger of Spring has touched them, but will recognize the appropriateness of that epithet for their wan, bleached, decayed aspect!

Then you have the whole process of trout-fishing, in the “mossy-tinctured stream,” where “the dark brown water aids the grilse,” showing that, as Thomson wrote, his thoughts reverted from Richmond to the streams of the Merse; you have also the song-birds piping each from its proper haunt, the linnet from “the flowering furze,”—the various places where each bird builds his nest, given with an accuracy that every bird-nesting boy will recognize; and the scent of the bean-fields, noticed for the first time, as far as I know, in poetry.