Let us compare a landscape painted by Pope in his Windsor forest, with the lines just quoted, and we shall see the difference between the art of Cowper, and that of the Augustan age.
Here waving groves a checkered scene display, And part admit and part exclude the day, As some coy nymph her lover's warm address Not quite indulges, nor can quite repress.
There interspersed in lawns and opening glades The trees arise that share each other's shades; Here in full light the russet plains extend, There wrapt in clouds, the bluish hills ascend, E'en the wild heath displays her purple dyes, And midst the desert fruitful fields arise, That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn.
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.
The low Berkshire hills wrapt in clouds on a sunny day; a sable desert in the neighbourhood of Windsor; fruitful fields arising in it, and crowned with tufted trees and springing corn--evidently Pope saw all this, not on an eminence, in the ruffling wind, but in his study with his back to the window, and the Georgics or a translation of them before him.
Here again is a little picture of rural life from the _Winter Morning Walk_.
The cattle mourn in corners, where the fence Screens them, and seem half-petrified to sleep In unrecumbent sadness.

There they wait Their wonted fodder; not like hungering man, Fretful if unsupplied; but silent, meek, And patient of the slow-paced swain's delay.
_He from the stack carves out the accustomed load Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft, His broad keen knife into the solid mass: Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands, With such undeviating and even force He severs it away_: no needless care, Lest storms should overset the leaning pile Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern'd The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear, from, morn to eve, his solitary task.
Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears And tail cropp'd short, half lurcher and half cur, His dog attends him.

Close behind his heel Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout; Then shakes his powder'd coat, and barks for joy.
Heedless of all his pranks, the sturdy churl Moves right toward the mark; nor stops for aught But now and then with pressure of his thumb To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube, That fumes beneath his nose: the trailing cloud Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.
The minutely faithful description of the man carving the load of hay out of the stack, and again those of the gambolling dog, and the woodman smoking his pipe with the stream of smoke trailing behind him, remind us of the touches of minute fidelity in Homer.

The same may be said of many other passages.
The sheepfold here Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe.
_At first, progressive as a stream they seek The middle field: but, scatter'd by degrees, Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land_.
There from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps _The loaded wain: while lighten'd of its charge, The wain that meets it passes swiftly by_; The boorish driver leaning o'er his team Vociferous and impatient of delay.
A specimen of more imaginative and distinctly poetical description is the well-known passage on evening, in writing which Cowper would seem to have had Collins in his mind.
Come, Evening, once again, season of peace, Return, sweet Evening, and continue long! Methinks I see thee in the streaky west, With matron-step slow-moving, while the Night Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employed In letting fall the curtain of repose On bird and beast, the other charged for man With sweet oblivion of the cares of day: Not sumptuously adorn'd, nor needing aid, Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems! A star or two just twinkling on thy brow Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine No less than hers, not worn indeed on high With ostentatious pageantry, but set.
With modest grandeur in thy purple zone, Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
Beyond this line Cowper does not go, and had no idea of going; he never thinks of lending a soul to material nature as Wordsworth and Shelley do.

He is the poetic counterpart of Gainsborough, as the great descriptive poets of a later and more spiritual day are the counterparts of Turner.