The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where ‘all was one full-swelling bed’; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by ‘the stock-dove’s plaint amid the forest deep,’
‘That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale’—
are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy, equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our ships at Carthagena—‘of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves,’ and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the deserts of Arabia. This last passage, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed.
‘—— ——Breath’d hot
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide-glitt’ring waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert, ev’n the camel feels
Shot through his wither’d heart the fiery blast.