Then again when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle, and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known clough, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades, while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene at any easy rate. None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit and disport in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance; but where is the living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that elegantly please the lover of nature. Nature delights me in every form. Later in life Thomson was “more fat than bard beseems,” and correspondingly indolent, and his biographers give the impression that no beauty of the world about him could compete with the charms of an easy chair. But his letters still bear witness to a love of Nature as real if not as active as that of his youth. In July, 1743, he wrote to Mr. Lyttleton promising to spend some weeks with him at Hagley: As this will fall in Autumn, I shall like it the better, for I think that season of the year the most pleasing and the most poetical. The spirits are not then dissipated with the gaiety of spring, and the glaring light of summer, but composed into a serious and tempered joy. The year is perfect.... The muses, whom you obligingly say I shall bring with me, I shall find with you--the muses of the great, simple country, not the little, fine-lady muses of Richmond Hill. Again four or five years later, he wrote to Paterson, “Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day.”[321] This passion for Nature finds frequent expression in the poems, but no citation of specific instances can be so convincing as the general impression of unforced personal enthusiasm made upon the reader of “The Seasons.” Moreover, Thomson’s conception of the effect of Nature on man, the next topic, may be fairly counted as but a transcript from his own experience, and therefore as further illustrative of his love for Nature.