where the stock terms scarcely harmonize with the simple Biblical diction. He was well aware of the attendant dangers and difficulties, and in the first book of “The Seasons” he gives expression to the need he feels of a language fit to render adequately all that he sees in Nature.[72] But though there is much that is fresh and vivid in his descriptive diction, and much that reveals him as a bold pioneer in poetic outlook and treatment, the tastes and tendencies of his age were too strong entirely to be escaped. Birds are the plumy, or feathered people, or the glossy kind,[73] and a flight of swallows is a feathered eddy; sheep are the bleating kind, etc. In one passage (“Spring,” ll. 114-135) he deals at length with the insects that attack the crops without once mentioning them by name: they are the feeble race, the frosty tribe, the latent foe, and even the sacred sons of vengeance. He has in general the traditional phraseology for the mountains and the sea, though a few of his epithets for the mountains, as keen-air’d and forest-rustling, are new. He speaks of the Alps as dreadful, horrid, vast, sublime. Shaggy and nodding are also applied to mountains as well as to rocks and forests; winter is usually described in the usual classical manner as deformed and inverted. Leaves are the honours of trees, paths are erroneous, caverns sweat, etc., and he also makes large use of Latinisms.[74]
John Dyer (1700-1758), though now and then conventional in his diction, has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author of “The Seasons.” Thus in the “Country Walk” it is the old stock diction he gives us:
Look upon that flowery plain
How the sheep surround their swain;
And there behold a bloomy mead,
A silver stream, a willow shade;
and much the same thing is to be found in “The Fleece,” published in 1757:
The crystal dews, impearl’d upon the grass,
Are touched by Phœbus’ beams and mount aloft,
With various clouds to paint the azure sky;