"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England, and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue." Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in Latinisms like _effusive_, _precipitant_, _irriguous_, _horrific_, _turgent_, _amusive_. The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress is bathing--that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"--is described as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms for trout bait, he puts it thus: "But let not on your hook the tortured worm Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc. The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance," who kept reminding them of Vergil.