instead of encountering the difficulties of his subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth. ‘Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come, And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veil’d in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.’ Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this, would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion through this and the following cantos? For instance, the very next passage is crowded with a set of striking images. ‘And see where surly Winter passes off Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts: His blasts obey, and quit the howling hill, The shatter’d forest, and the ravag’d vale; While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost, The mountains lift their green heads to the sky. As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed, And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze, Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets Deform the day delightless; so that scarce The bittern knows his time with bill ingulpht To shake the sounding marsh, or from the shore The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath, And sing their wild notes to the list’ning waste.’