Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet "brown," where all that is motionless is white—
"The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants."
That one word proves the poet. Does it not?
The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by memory—a critic you may always trust to—is admirable; except in one or two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic, and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased to be perfectly natural. Thus—
"Drooping, the ox
Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil."
The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of all his toils"—to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was well entitled—sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call it doubtful—for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment. Again—
"The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
With looks of dumb despair."
The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us—one night at Ambrose's—that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds—
"Then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."
For, as they disperse, they do look very sad—and no doubt are so; but had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks had perished.