while he paraphrases a portion of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew into: Observe the rising lily’s snowy grace, Observe the various vegetable race, They neither toil nor spin, but careless grow Yet see how warm they blush, how bright they glow, where the stock terms scarcely harmonize with the simple Biblical diction. He was well aware of the attendant dangers and difficulties, and in the first book of “The Seasons” he gives expression to the need he feels of a language fit to render adequately all that he sees in Nature.[72] But though there is much that is fresh and vivid in his descriptive diction, and much that reveals him as a bold pioneer in poetic outlook and treatment, the tastes and tendencies of his age were too strong entirely to be escaped. Birds are the _plumy_, or _feathered people_, or _the glossy kind_,[73] and a flight of swallows is _a feathered eddy_; sheep are _the bleating kind_, etc. In one passage (“Spring,” ll. 114-135) he deals at length with the insects that attack the crops without once mentioning them by name: they are _the feeble race_, _the frosty tribe_, _the latent foe_, and even _the sacred sons of vengeance_. He has in general the traditional phraseology for the mountains and the sea, though a few of his epithets for the mountains, as _keen-air’d_ and _forest-rustling_, are new. He speaks of the Alps as _dreadful_, _horrid_, _vast_, _sublime_. _Shaggy_ and _nodding_ are also applied to mountains as well as to rocks and forests; winter is usually described in the usual classical manner as _deformed_ and _inverted_. Leaves are the _honours_ of trees, paths are _erroneous_, caverns _sweat_, etc., and he also makes large use of Latinisms.[74] John Dyer (1700-1758), though now and then conventional in his diction, has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author of “The Seasons.” Thus in the “Country Walk” it is the old stock diction he gives us: Look upon that _flowery plain_ How the sheep surround their _swain_; And there behold a _bloomy mead_, A silver stream, a willow shade; and much the same thing is to be found in “The Fleece,” published in 1757: The crystal dews, impearl’d upon the grass, Are touched by Phœbus’ beams and mount aloft, With various clouds to paint the azure sky; whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear, sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in “The Fleece” (Bk. III): The scatter’d mists reveal the dusky hills; Grey dawn appears; the golden morn ascends, And paints the glittering rocks and purple woods. Nor must we forget “Grongar Hill,” which has justly received high praise for its beauties and felicities of description.