All that follows is, you know, as good—better it cannot be—till we come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven—
"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard
By such as wander through the forest walks,
Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves.
But who can hold the shade, while heaven descends
In universal bounty, shedding herbs,
And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap?
Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth;
And, while the milky nutriment distils,
Beholds the kindling country colour round."
Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out one of the many there—and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the horizon round a settled gloom," or rather, he would not have seen or thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said—
——"But lovely, gentle, kind,
And full of every hope and every joy,
The wish of Nature."
Leigh Hunt—most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics—somewhere finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'—
"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"
that is, the man about to be murdered—imagination conceiving as one, doom and death. Equally great are the words—
"Herds and flocks
Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye
The falling verdure."
The verdure is seen in the shower—to be the very shower—by the poet at least—perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited with gladness—
"Hush'd in short suspense,
The plumy people streak their wings with oil,
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off,
And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once,
Into the general choir."