It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his vision is called to the springing lark:
Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.
Close to his eye his hat he instant bends
And forms a friendly telescope that lends
Just aid enough to dull the glaring light
And place the wandering bird before his sight,
That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along;
Lost for a while yet pours a varied song;
The eye still follows and the cloud moves by,
Again he stretches up the clear blue sky,
His form, his motions, undistinguished quite,
Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.
In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his poles and starts again brushing round.
Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit
Confess the presence of a pretty face.
She is very rustic herself in her appearance:—
Her hat awry, divested of her gown,
Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown:
Invidious barrier! why art thou so high,
When the slight covering of her neck slips by,
Then half revealing to the eager sight
Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?
The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land; not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails, against which he protests in this place when describing the summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.
"Autumn" opens bravely:
Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods,
The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods
Invite my song.