“The Sofa suits The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb, Though on a sofa, may I never feel: For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink, E’er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds, To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames; And still remember, nor without regret, Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared, How oft, my slice of pocket-store consumed, Still hungering, penniless, and far from home, I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws, Or blushing crabs, and berries that emboss The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.” This, the first rural passage in the “Task,” strikes the note of difference between Cowper’s way of describing Nature and Thomson’s; Cowper unhesitatingly introduces the personal element, describes actual and individual scenes as he himself saw them in his morning or evening walk. Or when rural scenes are not thus personally introduced, they everywhere come in as interludes in the midst of the poet’s keen interest in human affairs, his quiet and delicate humor, his tender sympathy with the poor and the suffering, his indignation against human wrong, his earnest brooding over human destiny, and his forward glances to a time when visible things will give place to a higher and brighter order. Thomson, on the other hand, describes Nature as seen by itself, separate and apart from human passion, or relieved only by some vapid episodes of a false Arcadianism. Hence, great as is Thomson’s merit for having, first of his age, gone back to Nature, the interest he awakes in it is feeble, because with him Nature is so divorced from individuality and from man. It is Nature in the general rather than the individual scene which he describes—Nature aloof from rather than combined with man. But her full depth and tenderness she never reveals except to the heart that throbs with human interest. But though Cowper sees the outer world as set off against his own personal moods and the interests of man, yet he does not allow these to discolor his scenes or to blur the exactness of their outlines. Fidelity, absolute veracity, characterize his descriptions. He himself says that he took nothing at second-hand, and all his pictures bear witness to this. Homely, of course, flat, tame, was the country he dwelt in and described. But to this day that Huntingdonshire landscape, and the flats by the sluggish Ouse, in themselves so unbeautiful, acquire a charm to the eye of the traveler from the remembered poetry of the “Task” and for the sake of him who wrote it. By that poetry it may be said that he “For scenes not beautiful did more Than beauty for the fairest scenes can do.” As one out of many landscapes described, take this:—