The return to Nature, begun by Ramsay in his “Gentle Shepherd,” was carried on by another Scot, though hardly a Scottish poet—Thomson, who a few years later (1728-30) published his poem of “The Seasons.” In this work, descriptive of scenery and country life through the four seasons, Thomson, it is alleged, was but working in a vein which was native to Scottish poets from the earliest time. Two centuries before, Gawain Douglas, in the prologues to his translation of the Æneid, abounds in description of rural things. I should hardly venture to say it myself, in case it might seem national prejudice, but a writer who is not a Scot, Mr. S. Brooke, has remarked that there is “a passionate, close, poetical observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the earliest times, such as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth.” In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of his poem, is there much savor of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject. It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, over-loaded with epithets, full of artificial invocations, “personified abstractions,” and insipid classicalities. It is a composite style of language formed from the recollection partly of Milton, partly of Virgil’s Georgics. Yet in spite of all these obstructions which repel pure taste and natural feeling, no one can read the four books of the “Seasons” through, without seeing that Thomson, for all his false style, wrote with his eye upon Nature, and laid his finger on many a fact and image never before touched in poetry. In the first few lines of “Spring” he notes how, at its approach, the plover and other birds which have wintered by the sea leave the shores and set far inland to their summer haunts in moors and hills. Whilst the season is still hanging uncertain between winter and spring, he notes how “Scarce The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulfed To shake the sounding marsh; or, from the shore, The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath, And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.” How true to nature this picture! how happily rendered! Then you have the plowman and his oxen beginning their work— “Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.” Again,— “From the moist meadow to the withered hill, Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs.” That “withered hill!” Who that has ever looked on the mountains in March, just before the first finger of Spring has touched them, but will recognize the appropriateness of that epithet for their wan, bleached, decayed aspect!