Flippant, pert, and full of play: He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird, Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush, And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm And anger insignificantly fierce.[486] Equally felicitous are the descriptions of tall grass fledged with icy feathers on a frosty morning,[487] or of the redbreast in a sheltered woodland path in winter.[488] These pictures and other similar ones immediately take a permanent place in one’s mental picture gallery. It would be difficult indeed for a painting to make the light dance as it does in that forest path. The squirrel absolutely tingles with life. The right word comes easily and the lines show exquisite deftness of literary touch. It is rare in any poetry to find more excellent examples of pure description than these and other passages in “The Task.” Cowper had the mind that watches and receives. He looked about him and wrote down in simple, sincere words the loveliness he found. He took notes, but they were of the right sort, mental and unconscious, the inevitable imprint on a sensitive mind of scenes that had ministered to his deepest need. The ministry of Nature to human needs is a cardinal principle in Cowper’s poetry. Nor was this conception merely theoretic. It was rather a transcript from his own experience. From childhood he had loved Nature,[489] and poems about Nature,[490] and he had always planned to live in the country.[491] After years of disappointment and terrifying fears, comparative peace came to him amid quiet country scenes. The instincts of his early days revived. Nature offered him a paradise of rich delights. She enchanted him. She gave him heart-consoling joys. She sweetened his bitter life, alluring him with smiles from gloom to happiness. The glory of each new morning was a lesson in hope. He found in Nature the nurse of wisdom, a power that could compose his passions and exalt his mind. He felt that in the country God spoke directly to his heart.[492] The obverse of this genuine love of the country is an equally genuine detestation of the town and town standards. The crowds that swarm to city streets are the subjects of repeated invectives, and there is even more emphatic scorn of sham lovers of Nature, as cockneys in suburban villas; girls who but for the show and dress-parade of the country would hurry back to the city; men who love hunting and fishing, and call it a love of Nature; sentimentalists, who exclaim over Thomson’s poetry, but prefer to read it in the city.[493] His own relationship with Nature was too intimate and too sacred to admit of indifference or profanation on the part of others. Cowper’s literary use of Nature was largely determined by his purpose in writing. His poetical thesis received its dogmatic summing-up in the famous dictum, God made the country and man made the town,[494]