and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend Paterson:

Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; and
now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on the
point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown.
The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know
that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in
about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk
runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of
day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till
you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some
snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth
Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect
model of the truest happy life.

It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. He
would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every
sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine
goodness in all. His _Seasons_ were the result.

There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some have
charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only catalogues
of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the inner life.

Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted by
sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape paintings.

The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not live,
and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His
predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not