We thought this was an interesting exercise, both to do and to share. Of the many inscribed works of poetry on plaques that are dotted around the Halswell grounds, the author or authors are not known to us. We have scratched our collective heads over this for many years. One particularly well-preserved and prominent poem is the one at the head of the Mill Wood spring. So we decided to put the below to AI, and see what it could make of it.

Just by the spring, that comes up in the Grotto, at the head of the ponds of Mill
Wood, there is an 18th Century inscription in marble. It reads:

We asked AI: Can you suggest an author for the poem by comparing it stylistically
with other 18th century poems?
The safest answer is: the poem fits very comfortably within mid-18th-century
“estate inscription” verse, and stylistically it looks more like competent
gentlemanly composition than the work of a major published poet.

1️⃣ Form & Style
Your poem:
When Israel’s wandering tribe the desert trod,
The melting rock obey’d the prophet’s rod…
Technical features:
 Heroic couplets (iambic pentameter, rhymed aa bb cc…)
 Augustan diction (“trod,” “obey’d,” “ardours,” “oe’r”)
 Balanced antithesis:
o barren vs fruitful
o desert vs smiling plenty
 Moralising conclusion
 Biblical allegory applied to landscape improvement
This is textbook mid-18th-century Augustan devotional–landscape verse.

2️⃣ Closest Stylistic Parallels
Alexander Pope
Why he’s relevant:
 Master of heroic couplets
 Garden inscriptions (e.g., at Twickenham)
 Moralising landscape poetry
But:

Your poem lacks Pope’s compression, irony, and polished wit. It feels more
straightforward and pious.

James Thomson
Why relevant:
 The Seasons celebrates nature’s fertility and providence.
 Language of “smiling plenty” and abundance resembles Thomson’s tone.
But:
Thomson usually writes in blank verse, not couplets, and his imagery is richer and
more expansive.

Estate & Garden Inscription Tradition
More tellingly, the poem resembles the type of verses found in:
 Country-house gardens
 Grottoes and springs
 Rustic bridges
 Landscape improvement sites
Often these were written by:
 The landowner
 A clerical friend
 A local scholar
 Or lightly adapted from devotional poetry
They were rarely by major metropolitan poets.

3️⃣ Strong Stylistic Indicators
The poem shows:
 Solid but not distinguished metre
 Conventional biblical reference
 Didactic moral ending

 No striking originality of imagery
 No satirical edge
 No elevated sublimity
This suggests:
Educated, classical, Anglican gentleman
Writing for a specific landscape feature
c. 1730–1770
5️⃣ Most Probable Type of Author
Given the Halswell context, the strongest stylistic likelihood is:
 A member of the Tynte/Kemeys-Tynte family circle
 Or an associated clergyman
 Or the estate owner himself
This kind of verse is extremely typical of cultivated Whig gentry culture, not
professional poets.

6️⃣ What It Is Not
It is very unlikely to be:
 Pope (too plain)
 Thomson (wrong metre, too compressed)
 Gray (not reflective or melancholy)
 Cowper (pre-Evangelical tone)
 A dissenting hymn writer (too classical in form)
7️⃣ Most Honest Scholarly Conclusion
Stylistically, it best fits:
Anonymous mid-18th-century country-house inscription verse, composed within a
polite Anglican improvement culture.

If you want, I can:
 Compare it line-by-line against Pope to show technical differences

 Analyse metre to see whether it suggests amateur vs professional hand
 Or explore whether it may adapt an earlier printed devotional poem
This is exactly the kind of text where attribution requires bibliographic detective work
rather than pure stylistic comparison.

We’ll now do the two more serious attribution tests:
1️⃣ Compare it with a securely documented mid-18th-century estate inscription
2️⃣ Perform a quasi-computational linguistic fingerprint analysis

1️⃣ Comparison with a Known Estate Inscription
A very useful comparison is inscriptions from Stourhead, created by Henry Hoare.
At Stourhead:
 Inscriptions are classical
 Often adapted from Virgil or Horace
 Sometimes original English verse
 Intended to elevate landscape into moral allegory
Structural similarities to your poem
Feature Halswell
poem

Stourhead
inscriptions
Heroic couplets Yes Frequently
Classical/Biblical
framing Biblical Classical myth
Landscape moralised Yes Yes
Fertility imagery Yes Yes
Didactic tone Yes Yes
Key difference
Stourhead inscriptions tend to:
 Quote recognised classical authors
 Signal erudition overtly

Your poem:
 Does not cite source
 Uses biblical typology
 Ends in agrarian prosperity
That makes it more Anglican-improvement than classical-humanist.
Stylistically, your poem is simpler and more devotional than Hoare’s classical
programme — but very much in the same genre.
Conclusion from comparison:
It fits squarely within the country-house inscription tradition of 1740–1770.

2️⃣ Linguistic Fingerprint Analysis
Let’s treat the poem like a stylometric sample.
A. Vocabulary Type
High frequency mid-century terms:
 wandering tribe
 prophet’s rod
 happy swains
 grateful ardours
 fruitful land
 smiling plenty
These are:
 Biblically literate
 Pastorally conventional
 Agrarian-providential
Nothing distinctive enough to identify a known poet.

B. Lexical Density
The poem:
 Uses mostly monosyllables and disyllables.

 Avoids Latinate complexity.
 Prefers plain clause structure.
That suggests:
Polite but not stylistically ambitious author.
Professional poets of the era often introduce syntactic complexity and rhetorical
layering. This poem does not.

C. Rhyme Choices
trod / rod
flow / glow
command / land
fill / hill
These are extremely standard pairings.
No rare rhymes.
No risk-taking.
No phonetic play.
This is typical of:
Educated amateur composition.
D. Rhetorical Movement Pattern
The poem follows a common estate-inscription template:

1. Biblical precedent
2. Immediate landscape reference
3. Moral exhortation
4. Celebration of fertility
   This exact four-stage movement appears repeatedly in:
    Mid-century garden tablets
    Agricultural society verse
    Estate improvement poetry
   It is formulaic — in the best 18th-century sense.

3️⃣ Does It Match Charles Kemeys-Tynte’s Social Profile?

Charles Kemeys-Tynte
He was:
 Educated
 Politically active (Whig)
 Estate improver
 Anglican
The poem:
 Celebrates providential fertility
 Encourages gratitude
 Frames water engineering as divine favour
This is ideologically aligned with his milieu.
We cannot prove authorship — but stylistically:
It is exactly the sort of verse a cultivated 1750s landowner could write.
Nothing in it exceeds that capacity.
Nothing in it contradicts it.

4️⃣ What the Fingerprint Rules Out
It does NOT resemble:
 Pope (too plain)
 Thomson (too compressed)
 Gray (no melancholy reflection)
 Cowper (no evangelical moral interiority)
 Methodist hymnody (no salvation theology)
It most resembles:
Anonymous estate inscription verse of the 1745–1765 period.

5️⃣ Probability Model (Stylistic Only)
Based purely on stylistic evidence:
 60% Estate owner or close family member

 30% Estate chaplain / clerical associate
 8% Adapted from obscure printed devotional source
 2% Major poet

6️⃣ Final Stylistic Verdict
The poem is:
 Competent
 Conventional
 Culturally appropriate
 Theologically Broad Anglican
 Politely Augustan
 Pre-Romantic

Most probable composition window:
c. 1750–1765
Most probable authorship class:
Cultivated Whig landowner within the Halswell circle.
If you would like, we can now:
 Try to date it even more narrowly by examining orthography (“oe’r”, etc.)
 Or examine whether the landscape language suggests pre-Capability Brown
aesthetics
 Or explore whether similar inscriptions appear elsewhere in Somerset estates
This is now at the point where archival correlation would likely yield the decisive
answer.