Here are appearances of Nature, each accurately observed, and their succession truthfully rendered, but the whole is so overlaid with tawdry diction that it is hard to pierce below the enamel and feel the true pulse of Nature beating under it. And yet it does beat there, and in many another description in the “Seasons” now little heeded, because of their old-fashioned garb. And yet he who will read the “Seasons” through will find many a phrase true to Nature, many a felicitous expression cropping out from the even roll of his solemn pompous monotone. Thomson has been called the Claude of poets. And his way of handling Nature stands to that of Wordsworth or Tennyson much as Claude’s landscapes do to those of Turner or some of the other modern painters. It may be added that Thomson’s somewhat vapid digressions about Amelia and Lavinia have not more meaning than the conventional lay figures and the classic temples which Claude introduces into the foreground of his landscapes. As to the sentiment which animates the “Seasons,” it is a revolt from the life of town and court to the simplicity and truth of rural life and feeling. It is almost the first time this revolt finds expression in English poetry, if we except some of the sylvan scenes in Shakespeare. As the French critic well says, “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had expressed all Rousseau’s sentiments, almost in the same style. Like him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him he contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries and corruption. Like him he exalted deep love, conjugal tenderness, the union of souls, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he combated contemporary frivolity and compared the ancient republics with modern states. Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose from the spectacle of Nature to the contemplation of God.... Like him, too, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous invocations, and oratorical tirades.” This passage gives truly, if with some exaggeration, the spirit with which the “Seasons” and all their outward imagery are informed. But while Thomson watched the ever-changing appearances and recorded them, what, it may be asked, was his thought about the Power which originates and upholds them? what did he conceive to be the relation of the things we see to the things we do not see? Everywhere his poem breathes a spirit of naturalistic piety. But if there is nothing in the “Seasons” inconsistent with Christian truth, there is little or nothing that directly affirms it. In “Winter” he breathes this prayer—