It soon appeared that while this nymph divine
Moved on, there met her rude uncivil kine.
Whilst he succeeds in depicting the life of the rustic poor, not as it appears in the rosy tints of Goldsmith’s pictures, but in all its reality—sordid, gloomy and stern, as it for the most part is—the old stereotyped descriptions are to be found scattered throughout his grimly realistic pictures of the countryside. Thus when Crabbe writes of
tepid meads
And lawns irriguous and the blooming field
(“Midnight”)
or
The lark on quavering pinion woo’d the day
Less towering linnets fill’d the vocal spray
(“The Candidate”)