'weeping mother's cot' to cheer that mother by moral renovation.

I now come to the second Poem, 'Allegorical lines.' This poem has sound
materials, but it wants some of your hard tinkering. Pardon my
unceremonious language. I do not like that affected old word,
'ill-besped' in the first line. To ascribe human feelings to a leaf, as
you have done through the whole Poem, notwithstanding your authority, as
I conceive, offensively violates reason. There is no analogy; no
conceivable bond of union between thought and inanimate things, and it is
about as rational as though, in sober reasoning, you were to make the
polished shoe remonstrate with its wearer, in being soiled so soon after
it had received its lustre. It is the utmost stretch of human concession,
to grant thought and language to living things;--birds, beasts, and
fishes; rights which the old fablers have rendered inalienable, as
vehicles of instruction; but here, as I should think, the liberty ends.
It is always a pity when sense and poetry cannot go together. They are
excellent arm-in-arm companions, but quarrelsome neighbours, when a stile
separates them. The first line in the second stanza I do not like.

'When the scythesman o'er his sheaf.'

Two objections apply to this line. The word scythesman, for a short poem,
is insufferably rough; and furthermore requires the inhalation of a good
breath, before it can be pronounced; besides which, as the second
objection, by connecting sheaves with scythesman, it shows that the
scythe is cutting wheat, whereas, wheat is cut with a hook or sickle. If
my agricultural knowledge be correct, barley and oats are cut with a
scythe, but these grains are not put into sheaves. Had you not better
substitute rustic, for scythesman?