The second instance is of a more imaginative kind. It is the presentation, in the Fourth Book, of Winter, with
forehead wrapt in cloud
A leafless branch thy sceptre,
almost the only occasion on which Cowper, despite the nature of his subject, has personified the powers and orders of nature.[239] Cowper has also invested the Evening with human attributes, and despite the imitative ring of the lines,[240] and the “quaintness” of the images employed, there is a new beauty in the evocation:
Come, Evening, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!
Methinks I see thee in the streaky west
With matron step slow-moving, while the night
Treads on thy sweeping train.
The darkness soon to fall over the landscape is suggested in the added appeal to Evening to come