Laudator Temporis Acti

Anonymous, [A Description] of a Winter's Morning, in The London Magazine (August 1752), p. 380:

The bleak North-east with nipping rigour reigns,
Congeals the ponds, and crusts the fields and plains;
The sun (in mists arising) faintly sees
Each cottage tipt with Snow — the leafless trees
Silver'd with frost — the fowler, for his prey,
With stealing steps, explores the roughen'd way;
The milk-maid he, resembling Daphne, spies,
With freshen'd vigour in her cheeks and eyes:
Now curling smoak from cottages ascends,
And kindled fire his failing heat amends:
The tender gentry, tim'rous of the cold,
Cling to their nests — th' athletick swain, more bold,
To the near farm, or distant market hies,
His limbs infolded with defensive frize;
With sturdy strides he tramples o'er the mound,
And beats, with iron hoof, the clatt'ring ground;
The houshold maid industriously prepares
To regulate her necessary cares;
While th' idle landlord, or the sottish 'squire,
Slugs in the bed, or hovers o'er the fire.

This poem also appears in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. David S. Shields (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 548, with the following citation on p. 884: "New York Gazette and Weekly Post-Boy 518 (January 1, 1753): 2." But its appearance in The London Gazette of 1752 makes it likely, to me at least, that this is not in fact an American poem. The American version has a variant, "prize" for "frize," in line 14. Frize is a recognized alternate spelling of frieze, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "A kind of coarse woollen cloth, with a nap, usually on one side only; now esp. of Irish manufacture."