But there is little of this kind of description in “The Task.” Now and then we meet with examples of the old periphrases, such as the _pert voracious kind_ for “sparrows,” or the description of kings as the _arbiters of this terraqueous swamp_, though many of these pseudo-Miltonic expressions are no doubt used for playful effect. In those parts of the poem which deal with the sights and sounds of outdoor life the images are new and fresh, whilst in the moral and didactic portions the language is, as a rule, uniformly simple and direct. But for the classical purity of poetical expression in which the poet is at times pre-eminent, it is perhaps best to turn to his shorter poems, such as “To Mary,” or to the last two stanzas of “The Castaway,” and especially to some of the “Olney Hymns,” of the language of which it may be said that every word is rightly chosen and not one is superfluous. Indeed, it may well be that these hymns, together with those of Watts and Wesley,[84] which by their very purpose demanded a mode of expression severe in its simplicity, but upon which were stamped the refinement and correct taste of the scholars and gentlemen who wrote them—it may well be that the more natural mode of poetic diction which thus arose gave to Wordsworth a starting point when he began to expound and develop his theories concerning the language of poetry.[85] Whilst Cowper was thus at once heralding, and to a not inconsiderable extent exemplifying, the Romantic reaction in form, another poet, George Crabbe, had by his realism given, even before Cowper, an important indication of one characteristic aspect of the new poetry. But though the force and fidelity of his descriptions of the scenery of his native place, and the depth and sincerity of his pathos, give him a leading place among those who anticipated Wordsworth, other characteristics stamp him as belonging to the old order and not to the new. His language is still largely that perfected by Dryden and Pope, and worked to death by their degenerate followers. The recognized “elegancies” and “flowers of speech” still linger on. A peasant is still a _swain_, poets are _sons of verse_, fishes _the finny tribe_, country folk _the rural tribe_. The word _nymph_ appears with a frequency that irritates the reader, and how ludicrous an effect it could produce by its sudden appearance in tales of the realistic type that Crabbe loved may be judged from such examples as It soon appeared that while this nymph divine Moved on, there met her rude uncivil kine. Whilst he succeeds in depicting the life of the rustic poor, not as it appears in the rosy tints of Goldsmith’s pictures, but in all its reality—sordid, gloomy and stern, as it for the most part is—the old stereotyped descriptions are to be found scattered throughout his grimly realistic pictures of the countryside. Thus when Crabbe writes of tepid meads And lawns irriguous and the blooming field