These were somewhat mortified to find their notions disturbed by the appearance of a poet, who seemed to owe nothing but to nature and his own genius.

But, in a short time, the applause became unanimous, every one wondering how so many pictures, and pictures so familiar, should have moved them but faintly to what they felt in his descriptions.

His digressions too, the overflowings of a tender benevolent heart, charmed the reader no less, leaving him in doubt, whether he should more admire the Poet or love the Man.' This case appears to bear strongly against us--but we must distinguish between wonder and legitimate admiration.

The subject of the work is the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of the year: and, by undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself to treat his subject as became a Poet.

Now, it is remarkable that, excepting the nocturnal _Reverie of Lady Winchelsea_, and a passage or two in the _Windsor Forest_ of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the _Paradise Lost_ and the _Seasons_ does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet has been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.