or the couplet in which Coleridge brings before us a subtle suggestion of the spring beauty, to which the storms and snows are but a prelude: And winter, slumbering in the open air Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring. (“Work without Hope”) Yet Thomson, as might be expected in a forerunner of the Romantic school, is not altogether without a gift for these embryonic personifications, as they have been called, when by means of a felicitous term or epithet the whole conception which the poet has in mind is suddenly galvanized into life and endowed with human feelings and emotions. Such evocations are of the very stuff of which poetry is made, and at their highest they possess the supreme power of stirring or awakening in the mind of the reader other pictures or visions than those suggested by the mere personification.[207] Though some of Thomson’s instances are conventional or commonplace, as in the description of the grey grown oaks That the calm village in their verdant arms Sheltering, embrace, (“Summer,” 225-227) and others merely imitative, as, the rosy-footed May Steals blushing on, (“Spring,” 489-490) yet there are many which call up by a single word a vivid and picturesque expression, such as the “hollow-whispering breeze” (“Summer,” 919) or the poet’s description of the dismal solitude of a winter landscape It freezes on Till Morn, late rising o’er the drooping world Lifts her pale eyes unjoyous (“Winter,” 744) or the beautiful description of a spring dawn: The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east. (“Summer,” 48-49)