the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual and extraordinarily true conclusion:
And swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight,
in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral:
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day;
for the castle, and for the rivers:
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave they go,
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life to endless sleep;
the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed into a sort of roundel:
Now, even now, my joys run high
As on the mountain turf I lie,
While the wanton Zephyr sings
And in the vale perfumes his wings;
While the waters murmur deep,
While the shepherd charms his sheep,
While the birds unbounded fly,
And with music fill the sky—
Now, even now, my joys run high;
with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure—all these and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort. He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad. But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is "unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet" for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial reader is not recommended to proceed from Grongar Hill to The Ruins of Rome, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to do—still less to The Fleece. But no attempt is being made here to prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good.